Try the library. They have a most excellent collection at least here in the Portland area. I get all my audio book and CD content there. Very low cost :)

I dont know about any free books, but a good alternative is to download iPodder from http://ipodder.sourceforge.net/ which enables you to use a simple interface to a lot of free audio materials via podcasting. Just to pick and click =)

I use it all the time to fill up my 20GB ipod!

You can always try Project Gutenberg...

They have some Human-Read Audiobooks that are pretty good. I especially like the Sherlock Holmes tales.

The selection is a bit sparse though... :-/

Yours,
Xavier

One fun possibility is Old Time Radio shows, essentially radio plays from the 1930's to 1960's. I started collecting them as MP3s a few years ago, and now have thousands. There are plenty of web and FTP sites that offer them, but a good "sampler" site is OTRCat at http://www.otrcat.com/

There are hundreds of shows now available, in every conceivable genre. Personal favourites include Sherlock Holmes, Suspense, The Shadow, Inner Sanctum, Quiet Please, The Whistler and the Orson Welles stuff like the Black Museum and Harry Lime. Check out http://www.mercurytheatre.info/ for all Welles' old Mercury Theater and Campbell Playhouse episodes, including the famous show that "panicked America", The War of the Worlds. You'll also find a few USENET alt.binary groups that post more Old Time Radio (aka, OTR) shows than you'll ever be able to listen to.

Great iPod material ready to be sucked down....

all my best,
dj

If you get audiobooks, you should look into a player that allows you to speed up/slow down the audio *without changing the pitch*. Enounce 2xav ( http://www.enounce.com/ )is a plugin for realplayer that allows you to do this with audio (and certain video). This works very well with pre-recorded blocks of audio (mp3s, etc)

The problem with streaming material (especially live streaming material), obviously, is that all of the audio is not yet on your system. But with realplayer, you can start a stream, pause it, and its tivo-like system will cache the stream. Then, once enough of the stream is in, you can zip through it with the 2xav plugin.

And as I said, it works well with most video. It worked for me on these Berkeley speeches: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/events/index.html

I think there are handheld players that have this feature, but I'm not sure which ones.

--chris

If you like Science Fiction, try Jim Kelly's Free Reads: http://www.jimkelly.net/pages/free_reads.htm

Don't forget to visit his tip jar...

-marc

There was a recent Ask Slashdot about something very much like this question, "Sources of Intelligent Audio for Commute." That story really turned me on to CBC radio programs, in particular Quirks and Quarks, but also Ideas.

The CBC has most of its content available free online, which as a Canadian I really like.

For high-quality commentary on the technology industry, try IT Conversations:

http://www.itconversations.com/

Not exactly a novel, but thought-provoking and related to Mozilla occasionally...