A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
as read by Dr. Stephen Hawkings*

Ok, sorry, that's not completely accurate. It's not read by the most brilliant man ever known on earth. This famous book by Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) is actually read by a computer. Thus, sounding like the famous Dr. Hawkings who has lost his ability to speak and uses a voice synthesizer instead.

But that doesn't diminish Mark Twain's work. And you still get it for FREE. No lie, no tricks. As I've previously written, Project Gutenberg offers many thousands of books for free and scores of them are available in audio format. You can download these books and have your computer or MP3 player read them to you. It's really easy and here's how you do it.

You start by going to the project Gutenberg website and finding a suitable book (use the Find an EBook link. Or, to specify the format you're interested in, use their advanced search and select the File Type of "Audio Books". I did that, using "Twain" as the author and got a list of five of his works that they have for free in audio format. (If you don't need it as an audio book, they have FIFTY-EIGHT of his works available!).

I selected "A Connecticut Yankee" from the list and it took me to THIS PAGE. It shows me a list of about forty-four chapters and some other files, like an informational "Readme" and one big "ZIP" file so you can fetch the whole book at once. I wouldn't recommend doing that unless you have a fast connection. Just download the first chapter, save it to your MP3 player and try it out. If you like it, go back for the rest of it and many others!

Oh, one more thing. Don't let that stuff about "Selecting a Download Site" intimidate you. There are so many books available on this site that they have servers located all around the world. You should select one close to you. So if you're in the USA, select one of the US servers. I live in the Western United States, so I selected the site in San Francisco. If the site you select is not available for some reason, just try another.

Daniel