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This is the last part of my 4 part series on building a home library inexpensively.
Be sure to check out the first 3 parts for more tips
Building a Home Library Inexpensively: Part 1 (books)
Building a Home Library Inexpensively: Part 2 (books)
Building a Home Library Inexpensively: Part 3 (sources for free magazines)
Today’s post concentrates on finding inexpensive to free sources of audio books.
My children love audio books. They listen to them while playing Lego, while eating lunch and during long road trips in the car. We borrow many of them from our local library, however they cannot keep up with my children’s demand for audio books.
Here are a few places I have discovered to help keep down the costs of my children’s habit.
1. Yard Sales
Audio books are scarce at yard sales, but they can be found. We have many yard sale titles of Adventures in Odyssey.
Thrifty Tip: Often yard sale audio books are in cassette tape form. If you don’t own a cassette player often you can find portable ones at yard sales for just $5, and headphones to go with them for $1.
2. Paperbackswap
Paperbackswap is not just for trading books. 2 book credits are worth 1 audio book. You can also trade back your audio book for 2 credits to receive another.
Thrifty Tip: Audio books do not cost that much more to ship than paper backs, but they are more to buy than second hand books, so this is a great way to get the best value out of your book credits.
3. Bookshouldbefree.com
I just found out about this site this weekend while reading my June 2012 edition of Women’s Day.
Booksshouldbefree.com has a large selection of audio books that you can download to your computer, mp3 player or to i-tunes for free. All are classic titles. There are 14 pages full of Children’s titles as well as many more titles in other genres.
4.Christian Audio
Christianaudio.com offers one free download per month of a full length current title. They also have many other free titles and podcasts available.
To receive your free title sign up for a free account and watch for e-mails each month.
I wish I knew of more ways to snag audio books for less, perhaps you do? Leave a comment below if you know of a great source of inexpensive or free audio books.
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This is wonderful! Thanks so much for the helpful tips!! My family loves audio books 🙂
You won’t have the audio books in hand, but librivox.org has many good books available for download and listening. free.
Thanks I will have to check that sight out. I have not heard of it before.
librivox has an app for your phone with extensive titles for free. you can either download them or listen on the go- I love it!
Thanks for the tip. I will have to check it out.
I learned about a few more resources for audio books from your post here. Thanks for sharing! I wish there were Adventures in Odyssey at yard sales near me. Lucky duck! {Visiting from Hip Homeschool Hop}
Great tips, thanks so much! Our family enjoys audio books, also, especially when on the road. Here from the Hop!
Another great site for original audio stories for children is sparkle stories.com. There are several different series. They have many titles you can download for free to sample the series and there are new stories every week. Subscriptions are pretty inexpensive. $7 for one series, $15 for three and any above three drop to $3.50 per month.
Thanks for the tip. I have not heard of that site before.