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Librivox – Great source of free childrens audio books
I came across a great source of Free Kids Audio Books on the Internet. Actually, I came across the site while looking for audio books, not childrens audio books specifically, but it looks their audio collection contains a lot of children titles.
Librivox.org (Notice the .org extension, because there are other sites but with different extensions)
The good thing about this site is that it is public domain, and it is maintained and fed by volunteers. Thus, if you feel you can contribute, do not hesitate, and meanwhile enjoy the great source of kids audio books it provides.
(Now on Technorati – token S6VK3ABHWPUH)
Free Kids Audio Books
Free Kids Audio Books abound on the Internet. You just have to make a search through google, and you will get around 50 million results. But does Free mean valuable and free? This is the question.
One of the perceptions of the Internet is that it gives Free Information, loads of Free Information, but this information is not necessarily valuable. The same applies to childrens audio books: From the millions of sites claiming to offer free kids audio books, you can find only tens of sites offering “really” free children story audio books, ZERO sites offering Free Educational children audio books, and ZERO sites offering Free Language Learning Children Audio Books.
If you look further at the sites offering free kids audio books, although these should be thanked for their effort and dedication, you can easily compare and discard a free Kids Audio Book from a non-free one. The difference is not only perceived, it’s staggering. From the accompanying sounds, to the tone of voice of the narrator, to the one versus many narrators style. However, as the saying goes “Enjoy anything that is free abundantly”, you can find free Kids Audio books at the following sites (Each week, I will be providing you with 2 sites offering Free Kids Audio Books), and if you have the chance to get your hand on a nice good quality audio book, please leave a comment below this article, this would be helpful for other readers.
- StoryNory
- LibriVox
As for the paid audio books, I am also including 2 resources that you may try: Your comments are most welcome!
- Learn Out Loud
- Audible
Big Whopper: Zigzag Kids, Book 2
Kids Audio Books – What to choose?
Kids Audio Books used to play a major part in our entertainment as kids, and this wasn’t yesterday. Still at that time, we didn’t make a difference between a good sound children audio book, and a poor quality one. This is because our perception was different. Today however this is no longer the case.
Actually, when I was a kid, long before the CD was in place, we used to play audio books cassettes, over and over, till the cassettes could no longer play, or get trapped in the cassette players. The sound was acceptable, or so we thought.
At that time, we used to search for radio stations, and as soon as we got a perceivable signal, we were satisfied with the sound we received, although at times, it was noisy, with a lot of interference noises. Now with the advent of technology, this is no longer something we can bear or even think of. If you don’t understand what I mean, take an old favorite cassette of yours and play it (if you can put your hands on a cassette player), you will immediately notice that the cassette sound is no longer acceptable to you, even if you are not sound oriented. This is because you are now accustomed to a much better sound quality.
The same is true for audio books in general, and particularly kids audio books. Now, without having passed through the old technology as we did, children take technology as something acquired. If today I show my kids a cassette, they will ask me what it is, and if I play a cassette to them, they will beg me to stop it, not because they don’t want to listen to its content, but because its audio quality stops them from reaching for the content. It’s not an acceptable sound for them.
Now, what’s specific to kids audio books is that in addition to the sound quality of the recording, the narrating voice need to be:
- Acceptable from a kid point of view
- Entertaining
- If possible, close to one of the parents voice
You will come through many sites promoting kids audio books on the internet. Some offer good quality, some offer good price, some offer freebies. But while going through these, here are my recommendations to you:
- Always choose your sources with your kids in mind, knowing that they are demanding in terms of sound quality
- Always listen to your downloads or purchases before playing them to your kids
- Always listen to part of the recording before making a purchase
Finally, if you find good sources for kids audio books on the internet, please do not hesitate to share them.
Children Audio Books – What they can do for your kids
Children Audio books are today the number 1 learning coupled with entertainment tool for children. This is why:
- They are easy to digest
- They are easy to start / stop / play to accommodate children different learning and listening skills
- They teach children a very important skill which is to listen and assimilate
- They are a learning tool, although children do not feel it
- They offer the largest variety of themes, fiction stories, so that you cannot think of a book today that hasn’t it’s audible version
- They offer sometimes abridged versions of the original audio book
So, if you haven’t already gotten in the habit of making your children listen to audio books, now is the time to do so. From 4 years and up, children cannot but get captivated by kids audio books, and by getting them to have this need, you cannot imagine the benefit you would be doing them.
Parents audio books as a development tool
Many times, parents are confronted to particular children behaviors, like denial in front of evidence, violent behavior, nightmares at night, etc. These behaviors are most of the time impossible to interpret or address, even for professionals in the field of education and psychology. They leave parents busted, not knowing what to do or how to act.
Fortunately, there are many parents audio books available to address this matter. Below, we will address an interesting title that we came across: It’s called Crash Course on Successful Parenting: 13 Dynamics of Raising Great Kids
Here’s the abstract of the book:
Successful Parenting is an excellent primer on the most important characteristics of parents who raise healthy and happy children. Beginning with the biggest fears that parents report, the books deals with dynamics of what it takes to understand your child at the various ages of life, the 4 things all children need no matter what their age, the gift of consistency, the commitment of time, the blessing of spiritual nurture, establishing traditions, healthy boundaries at the various ages, dealing with difficulties, educational choices, teaching life skills that lead toward independence and more!
You can read more about this book here:
If you happen to listen to this parents audio book, please do not hesitate to post your review below.
Children Audio Books with parents voice!
Lately, I have come across a website that is promoting a method for parents to read and record audio books for their own children. The concept is nice, even though in my opinion, it would be much richer and entertaining if these kids audio books recorded by some parents can be made available and shared with others. Maybe, contributing parents can have free access to titles, and others would have to pay some small charge for downloading the children audio books.
Anyhow, the concept as it is is interesting for the following reasons, as stated in their website:
- The recorded kids story book sound is very professional, with great music and sound effects that kids will love.
- The system as it is designed show the parent when to speak and which line to read. When you are happy it is sounding just right, it produces a high-quality MP3 with all the music and sound effects for a listening experience that is fun and worthwhile.
- There is a a wonderful choice of titles to suit everybody’s choice. From The Snail and the Whale and Laura’s Star, to Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs, with new titles being added all the time!
- There is a free trial for every one.
The website address is the following Childrens Audio Books with parents voice. If you happen to try it, please share your experience with us, and if you care, share your children audio book, and we will make it available here for download by others, and we will form eventually an Audio Book Club.
A great software that can generate loads of kids audio books instantly!
Long ago, I used to have a software to convert text to audio. Its name was ReadAloud and it was open source.
I don’t know if anyone has tried this software (that still exists by the way), but it used to be quite painful to listen to the robot voice reading the text. You could barely listen to the voice more than 2 minutes, and you had to be extremely concentrated to be able to understand what was read.
Last week, while wondering if there had been any advance in that kind of software, I did some research, and I came across a lot of titles that pretend to read text. I did download all those I could find on the first two pages of google, and I can say that there has been a lot of advance in the text reading voices software field.
Now, instead of the robotic voice, the software titles come with many natural sounding voice options. The reading can be boring if the material we listen to is very long, but for a short kid story book or for classical children audio books, the result could be acceptable.
Below, I am including the link for one particular software that caught my attention because of the many options it has. For instance:
- It can convert any text including pdf and web pages to an audio format (mp3)
- It has many voice options, including american english, british english, french, spanish and german among other languages
- One of the optional versions (the educational one) comes with 1000 free ebooks
- One of the optional versions (the educational one) allows the creation of audio books with background music, echo, etc. which is great
This kind of software could be a great resource for parents looking:
- To easily and freely create children audio books for their kids of numerous kinds
- Improve their kids language skills
Please try it and give me your opinion.
Read Aloud
Cartoons v/s Kids Audio Books
Most children love cartoons (Adults too as a matter of fact), but what benefit do they take from cartoons?
Sure, cartoons are entertaining, and they can also develop a child’s imagination, but how do that compare to the advantages of audio books:
- When the child can see no image in front of him or her, his or her imagination is stimulated much more than if he or she can see an image
- When the child has no picture in front of him or her, he or she gets himself to concentrate, thus developing his or her concentration skills
- When the child can only rely on his or her hearing to understand what is going on in the story, he or she gets better at listening comprehension
These are only some of the advantages your child gets by listening to audio books of all sorts, whether they are kids story books, or christian audio books, or any children audio book for that matter, so it should be our duty as parents to encourage them from their young age to listen to audio books, and to allow them to get into that habit, and to make them derive pleasure from that habit, we need to select the good audio books, not just anyone that we can find around.
As stated in a previous post, I am conducting a study about the various kinds of childrens audio books that we can find on the web, and I will be posting the study results shortly. Stay tuned!
Free Children Audio Books – Do they have any value?
Generally, people are attracted by what is offered free of charge. While that behavior is only normal and makes one feel good, and feel like one has hit a jackpot, not everything that is given free of charge has value.
In the past two days, I have browsed the internet extensively in search of free childrens audio books, I have come across some of interest to which I will be linking in a separate section shortly. I have also come across many small kids audio books that are also of value, not because of the story or the way it is told, but because they are accompanied by a text that can be printed, and that can offer good value for someone learning a language. I will also be posting links about these shortly.
These free resources of value represent about 10% of all the free resources on the internet concerning kids story books, most of which are of little use from a parents and from a child point of view. Unfortunately, the best resources available in the form of audio books are paid ones, but it’s like everything in life, nothing is really free.
Christian Audio Books and Spiritual Development
In the hectic times we live or that we put ourselves into, and because we are busy all the time doing things for our work, for our home, for our family, and for our kids, we usually do not have enough time to develop ourselves spiritually. Throughout our life, we can become very rich financially, we can amass a large amount of friends and acquaintances, we can even reach to a point where we are at our best personally, but what it is of our spiritual development.
On Sundays, many times, we look for all kinds of excuses not to go to church. At times even we go, we are busy thinking about what will come next during our day, we get easily distracted by the voice of the priest, or what this and that person is wearing. This is especially true on occasions when we go to the church to witness the marriage of a friend or close person. In summary, we reach times where we are completely away from our christian and parish life, and by the same token from our christian values.
This emptiness in our spiritual life is not compensated for elsewhere. We barely read the bible, we rarely meditate, and on top of all that, our children follow our mediocre spiritual life, unconsciously by following our example. We later wonder why so many kids turn into delinquents nowadays, and we even tend to push away the thought that this may happen to our kids. In one sentence, we mask our eyes, and we make ourselves believe that things do not exist because we are not seeing them, while we have our eyes masked in the first place.
What if we can turn all this round in an easy way, not cumbersome, and rather easy to follow? What if we get ourselves to listen to christian audio books for a fixed number of minutes each day? What if we make it a habit not only to listen to christian audio books ourselves, but rather to play them or to play the bible for 5 or 10 minutes each day in family, and later meditate together about what we have just listened to? Would not that be an enriching experience both for ourselves and for our kids? Would not that put back on the right track to spirituality and self-fulfillment?
Today, we have incredible means to develop ourselves spiritually, in a fun and easy way, while involving all the family, and benefiting immensely from the experience. This can be done through the tens of christian audio book titles that we can find pretty everywhere, so we really have no excuse to remain on a dead road spiritually.