Audiobooks are a great way to pass the time on a long journey, can ease your journey whilst commuting, can be used to keep the kids occupied in the car, make working out less monotonous and generally, are a great way to keep yourself and others entertained whilst on the go.

Unfortunately, audiobooks are also pretty darn expensive too! And what do you do with an audiobook when you've done listening to it? Throw it on a shelf to collect dust? Sell it on ebay for a fraction of the price you bought it for?

Or how about a better solution...swap it for a new one!

Audiobook swap sites allow you to swap your old used audiobooks with others who have unwanted second hand audiobooks themselves. It's a great deal for both parties, you both get a new audio book to listen to and you didn't pay $20, $30, $40 or more for the priviledge!

Audiobook swapping has the potential to save you a lot of money and as all the audio book trading sites I will list below are free to join, it's not going to cost you a penny to get started either. In fact, some of them give you free swapping credits to get your started so you can get some free audiobooks this way too!

Paperbackswap is quite possibly the largest place in the United States where you can swap books with people from coast to coast and save money.

Despite the somewhat misleading name, Paperbackswap offers the opportunity to swap more than just paperback books. In fact, you can swaps paperbacks, textbooks, hardbacks, cookbooks, game guides, graphic novels and yes, audiobook sharing is available here too!

The great thing here is you can swap your all kinds of unwanted reading material here for audiobooks on CD or cassette tape too, rather than having to do a straight swap audiobook for audiobook. Each paperback swapped gets/costs you 1 credit, each audiobook gets/costs you 2 credits...so basically, you can get an audiobook for the cost of 2 paperbacks. Or you can swap paperbacks (hardbacks etc) on a one for one basis.

If you do not have any audiobooks for trade, (or paperbacks), then you can also buy credits here at $3.45 each, or if you check out the forums, you'll find people selling their excess credits for around $3 per credit. That works out around $6 - $7 an ebook if you decide you'd rather participate that way...vastly cheaper than other ways of buying audiobooks which often cost in excess of $30. In fact, the very thing which got me into audiobook exchange sites in the first place was walking into an independant bookstore and finding the audiobook I wanted was a staggering $60 to buy. That's a crazy amount of money to spend in my opinion. $7 I can deal with...

A further great thing about paperbackswap for new members is they give you a joining bonus when you list your first 10 books available for trade into the system. These need not be all audiobooks, or even any of them be audiobooks, as ten paperbacks will suffice, but when you do so, you will be given 2 credits as a welcome bonus.

That's a free audiobook!

Paperbackswap is the audiobook swapping site I enjoy using the most and as it is free to join, I strongly suggest you check it out as well.

Join PaperbackSwap Here

Whereas paperbackswap is restricted to the United States, Bookmooch is a global swap site allowing you to swap audiobooks with people from countries all around the world. This means you can also often find audiobook recordings in languages other than English which might be something you are interested in if English is not your native language, or if you are learning a new language and want some challenging audio etc.

Bookmooch is another swap site which isn't dedicated solely to audiobooks but also allows you to swap books with others as well.

You get one swap credit for every book or audio book you send out to other members which you can use to request one book or audiobook yourself from other members around the world. It's a straight one for one swap here, plus you get 0.1 points for every book trade you perform which receives positive feedback from the receiving member which again means one free audiobook for every ten successful exchanges you perform.

Bookmooch gives you one free credit for every ten books you list for swapping on the site which means one free book or audiobook for every ten you list on the site as well although there is a caveat here in that you need to maintain a swapping ratio of at least 3:1 or you will not be able to request more books until you do - this is to keep the idea of swapping alive rather than having people stockpiling points in one way or another and messing up the system.

Check Out Bookmooch Here

Often when you read about getting things like free books to download or free downloadable audiobooks, you are being encouraged to engage in illegal activity of some sort or other. Many file sharing networks online are highly dubious to say the least, others are outright engaging copyright infringing activites and if that's what you want, then look elsewhere, I'll not be showing you how to find this kind of illegal download site here.

However, for those of us who do enjoy staying on the right side of the law, there are a large number of free audiobook files to download on a few great audiobook websites. In general, these freely downloadable audiobooks are classics which are out of copyright and which people have kindly donated their time to read and make available to the general public although there are also a few newer authors who want to get their name out there who have put their work into the public domain too.

By checking out the following free audiobook download sites you will find classic spoken books like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, The War Of The Worlds by H. G. Wells, Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carol, Little Women by Louisa may Alcott and many more of the greats whose copyright has expired and are now in the public domain.

Audiobook file formats vary from site to site, although mp3 audio books and WMA audiobooks are the most common. You may also need a program which can deal with .zip files too to unpack some of the downlaods.

Librivox.org

Books Should Be Free

Free Classic Audiobooks

Audiobooks For Free