Self Made Scholar hosts a comprehensive collection of links to online classes in over 80 subjects. They also link to collections of free books and audiobooks.
posted by Upton O'Good on Jun 1, 2008 - 7 comments

British actor Jim Dale is greeted as a "star" by children and adults when he appears in public and at readings. He has narrated the U.S. audiobooks for the "Harry Potter" series. For the series he worked six-and-a-half-hour days, recording about 18 to 20 pages. Over eight years he has crafted over 200 distinctive voices for the books' characters. He takes into account the aging of the main characters, who started out as 10 and 11 in “Sorcerer’s Stone” and are now 17 and 18 in “Deathly Hallows.” Like the books, the tapes and CDs have been a publishing phenomenon selling more than 5.7 million copies. For his work on the “Harry Potter” series, Mr. Dale has won a Grammy Award, a record 9 Audie Awards (the Oscars for audiobooks) and holds the record for creating the most voices in an audiobook in the Guinness Book of World Records. Audio clips and video interview.
posted by ericb on Jul 22, 2007 - 39 comments

Speaking of free audio books, Project Gutenberg is currently working on releasing about 500 free, public domain audio books in mp3 format. Among the titles included are Melville's Typee, A Midsummer Night's Dream,A Modest Proposal, Huck Finn, and many, many more. I have some Great Expectations for this one...
posted by kaibutsu on Mar 27, 2004 - 15 comments

I was looking through my old posts, and found a mention of mp3lit.com from several months back (yeah, yeah, I know, I'm going to the well for new material...). It's still just spoken word mp3s for download, but the quantity and quality seems to have gone up considerably. There's a great fiction piece by Parker Posey (mmmm...Parrrkerrr Pooooseeeey), one of my favorite musicians Nick Cave talking about religion, Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo doing some self-help stuff, Bill Bradley talking about affirmative action, and hey look! Douglas Coupland is doing a live event next Friday!
posted by mathowie on Jan 21, 2000 - 0 comments

Wow, a killer new site: mp3lit.com. Listen to books in mp3 format. Wouldn't it be great if this was Shoutcasted and a global wireless broadband network was in place so you could hear it in your car or walking around? Another cool thing would be if they hooked up with The Gutenburg Project and had audio versions of all those free texts.
posted by mathowie on Sep 21, 1999 - 0 comments