Free Audiobooks for You and Your Students

You know that kid who needs to hear you read aloud the voices of the current book you’re studying? Take that kid and show him AudioBooksSync, a site that’s offering 30 free titles this summer.

In browsing Sync’s offerings, it seems there’s plenty to entertain our students with independent reading, use as supplements to lessons we already teach (there’s a full-length version of Things Fall Apart and the giveaway series wraps up in August with a collection of 16 classic American short stories), or just use as entertainment during roadtrips with our own families.

Now through August 17, we can grab two titles a week from a rotating selection of offerings designed to have wide appeal. Sync, sponsored by AudioFile Magazine, pairs a contemporary young-adult title each week with a similarly themed classic or non-fiction book. Here’s a sample of this summer’s tasty pairings and the full list can be viewed here:

Each book is available for only seven days, so you’ll need to move fast to grab any that you want. To receive updates when new titles are posted, folks can text syncya to 25827 to receive an alert each week about the current featured titles. (Yup, I did this because there’s no way my brain will remember to go back on July 28 and grab Walter Dean Myers’ Juba!)

The audiobook files must be accessed through the OverDrive app on mobile devices or OverDrive’s desktop software (both are free), and we’re not allowed to share them online or give copies to our students. Instead, interested kids will need to sign up for their own accounts and download the books themselves. Still, we are allowed to listen to the audiobooks with our classes. Also, there’s an option in the desktop software to burn the file to a CD for long-term storage. Finally, the file won’t disappear after a set amount of time, as some cloud-based purchases do; instead, the site says we’ll have forever-access to the file via OverDrive once we’ve downloaded it.

Two minor disclaimers: First, I haven’t read all of these books and can’t know if they’re appropriate for your students. Use good judgment. Second, the OverDrive desktop download isn’t exactly a kid-friendly one-click experience. I’m pretty tech savvy, but it still took me a few minutes to figure out how to access the downloads. This FAQ section was helpful. Setting everything up on my phone was much easier than wrangling the files on my laptop.

Hope you like! Teach on, everyone.

Special thanks to blog reader Chelsey F. for giving us the heads-up on this great resource.

Please note: I have no business relationship with AudioFile Magazine and have received nothing in exchange for this blog post. I just like learning about cool stuff and sharing it with our teacher tribe.