Barnes & Noble has 9 free audiobooks right now. 8 are short stories, but “The Adventure’s of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain should be in everyone’s collection and is the full-length novel. Just go to the Barnes & Noble Audiobook MP3 Free Download Offer page. You can add each one to your cart by clicking the button. After you do, you’ll be sent to a new page. To go back and add more, just look on the middle column under “Recent Searches” for a link back to the free books page.

Once you’ve got the ones you want, just click the big “Proceed to Checkout” button and then the “Begin Checkout” if you don’t have a B&N account. Once you do, you’ll just enter your email. Then scroll clear down to the bottom enter a credit card (better a credit card than a debit card, for your own sake) and your name and address. Next, click the “Checkout” button. Finally, give it a password, select a security question and answer, and click the “Continue Checkout” button. Note: I also recommend unckecking the little checkbox that tells them to keep your Credit Card on file, unless you think you’ll be making more purchases from Barnes & Noble online.

After all that, you’ll just need to click the large “Place My Order” button and an email will be sent to you with instructions to get your free audio books. If you don’t intend to use them in the future, I recommend uninstalling their little download program when you’re done. That way you don’t install one more piece of software that clutters up your computer and makes it run slower.

These audiobooks are in MP3 format so they’ll work on iTunes or Windows Media, or whatever personal MP3 player you have.

I know Louis L’Amour and Mark Twain well (I grew up on them), and vaguely Alice Munro and Kurt Vonnegut, but other than that am not familiar with any of the other authors, so let me know if there’s any I need to download and listen to.

Those who know me, know I’m pretty big on legaly purchasing music. But as you can probably deduce from some of the other posts on this blog, I also like to save money. So when Amazon.com starts offering tons of MP3’s for free, I get excited.

Amazon is the first major seller of legal music to make any real headway in market share against iTunes. I’m a pretty big fan of iPods and think iTunes is pretty cool and getting better. But I also like competition in the free market, it forces the best to get better or be surpassed. I think its because Amazon has started to do so well that iTunes finally switched to all music that does not contain any copy-protection. This means if you want to use music from your iTunes library for things like home videos, etc., there won’t be a problem with any new music purchased on iTunes, or any that’s been upgraded to iTunes-Plus. Amazon’s MP3’s have been this way all along. And right now there’s over 700 free tracks (mostly songs, but some other stuff too) avalable on the Amazon store. So if you haven’t already, now’s a good time to give Amazon a try. It’s compatible with iTunes or Windows Media Player. You’ll just need to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader, but don’t worry its easy and just part of the setup process. If you already have an Amazon account, its even easier.

Some of my favorites are:

• “Summer’s Gone” by Jackopierce
• “Color” by Toby Lightman

If you find some others you realy like, let me know. I haven’t had time to go through the over 700 songs, so I’d love to check them out.