eMediaLibrary

Download best-selling digital audiobooks 24/7 to your PC at home, in the office, or from anywhere in the world. You can transfer titles to your portable device and many can be burned to CD to listen on the go.

The eMediaLibrary, powered by OverDrive, offers a new look to the former ListenIllinois website, but the same, friendly user experience. New features include AudioFile reviews and browsing by collection of recently returned titles, staff recommendations and more.

• The collection has over 1,300 audio book titles from various publishers including best sellers, popular fiction, mysteries, teach your-self a new language and includes some teen and children’s titles as well. 
  
• 3 week check out, may be renewed, one copy per title, can be reserved with email address.
• Learn how to use Overdrive through this presentation  Presentation or Quick Start Guide

 Requirements

• Personal computer with Internet access.
• Media Console for Overdrive (download here for free).
• MP3 Player (does not work with iPods or other devices).
• Supports playback of secure or protected Windows Media Audio (WMA) files.
• Storage capacity of at least 256 MB.
  
• Recommended features: Players that support book marking (designates a place within a file and returns to that place), full time stamping (does not limit the time tracking of a file in any way and allows the full length of an eAudiobook file to display).
  
• MP3 compatibility for Overdrive. CNET- Best MP3 players for audio books (article from Nov. 2007)

Free Audio Book

• To help you find additional audio book content the web has to offer, we've compiled a list of resources for free audio books on a wide range of interesting topics.  Most of the titles you'll find include classics and those in  public domain.   If know of any good sites we overlooked, please leave a link in the comments.

• LibriVox, the king of free audio books. You can use the catalog to search through their library of nearly 1000 works, all part of the public domain.
• AudioBooksForFree also has a big catalog to sort through, with an emphasis on classic works, but a decent amount of mystery, sci-fi, and thriller as well. You do have to pay for quality: the lowest quality downloads are free but anything better than 8 Kbps costs $5-8.
• FreeClassicAudioBooks - Although the library isn’t huge, there are a lot of big names. They are also offer a format that will work with an iPod.
• ProjectGutenberg - Besides their free print content they also has a huge audio section? They’ve got everything from Aesop to Zola, including a decent number of works in French, German, and other languages.
• LearnOutLoud - Over 500 educational titles and offers a lot of video as well.