Audio Books - Any player and "store" reccomendations?

[zami]

The only thing I -still- miss from Windows, is my Audible.com account and player. (I've never gotten the audible player to work correctly under Wine, and it's hit&miss to set it up under Windows via VMWare Server. And the service has doubled in price since I used it, so I'm not TOO motivated anyhow!)

So, to those of you who enjoy audio books, I'm asking...

Do you download your books? Have a favorite pay-for-books service/subscription? Have a favorite free downloads source?

Or do you rent your books in a physical format? If so, what service do you use?

-zami

[banjobacon]

These probably won't satisfy your need entirely, but they might still interest you:

LibriVox (http://librivox.org/) provides community-created audio books of public domain books. There are also several short story podcasts, such as Escape Pod (http://www.escapepod.org/), which does sci-fi short stories.

[helloyo]

i've just been getting into audio books myself as well. all my wasted hours of driving every week are now used for some good.

looking forward to any recommendations.

[zami]

Ooooh, thank you banjobacon. LibriVox I'm familiar with, but I hadn't even considered looking for story based podcasts. Escape Pod looks great! I'll check it out tonight, most likely.

I came across LibriVox through the Gutenberg Project ( http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Audio_Books_Project ) , which also has links to similar resources.

But I'm really hoping to find more sources for books -not- from the public domain.

Pay-to-download, or free, or some Netflix-but-audio-books type service.

I've come across a few stores (I'd have to dig up the URLs) with pay-to-download .mp3s of books, but they've been a little too spendy for me (say, $40 for a three hour reading - no thanks!)

Anyhow, I'm looking looking forward to further suggestions!

-zami

[banjobacon]

Does Audible use DRM? Can you still play your purchased audiobooks in Ubuntu?

[marcus2004]

If you have windows you can get a DRM audiobook and convert it with tunebite to mp3 or ogg. It is perfectly legal as it just records whatever is playing from the sound card. (It needs windows media player or itunes though)

http://www.simplyaudiobooks.com/
Looks interesting although I haven't tried it.
I usually check the newsgroups and get most of my stuff there.