Podiobooks.com - Free (Serialized) Audio Books - Donations Shared with Authors

[mouser]

I'm not sure I really get the point of serializing these books (means you get a new chapter each week), but they are free and I really like the idea that they run on donations and share donations with authors..

Podiobooks is a term coined by Evo Terra of The Dragon Page and Slice of Scifi to describe serialized audio books which are made available in podcast format. Subscribers to the podcast feed for each book will receive a new chapter each and every week. Some listeners keep it on their computers, some transfer the book to CD, but most (hopefully) transfer the file on to their mp3 player so they can listen no matter where they are.

All the books you'll find on podiobooks.com are provided by the authors to you for free. Many authors do this to get exposure for their work, others do it in the hopes you'll buy their next work in development. Still others simply do it for the sheer joy of writing. And while it's not required, you have the option to donate money to the author of your choice. When you consider that audio books run usually 50% more than their hardcover counterparts... we hope you'll be generous. Authors receive 75% of all the proceeds from the donations from listeners. The smaller portion goes to the maintenance and upkeep of podiobooks.com.
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1778 episodes available for download in 80 titles
5,738 Active Members
Over 1,067,585 episodes downloaded since 10/1/2005

http://www.podiobooks.com/

from www.boingboing.com

[app103]

This is a pretty cool idea.

You can manually download the files instead of using some sort of podcast client.

And for complete books, you can download all chapters at once, if you go to the book's page after subscribing and click 'release all episodes'. Then you will get links at the bottom of the page to download all the .mp3 files.

And they support download managers!  (at least it works for me using Flashget)