For instance, I just read animal farm with the audiobook posted on YouTube. I’ve found the audio helps me to comprehend better. What are some great books I can get from my school and download the audio to my iPod from online? My school doesn’t have audiobooks, so I’m wondering if there’s any place online I can get them for free. Thanks for your understanding.
Several web sites offer online full-texts of books that are out of copyright, e.g. www.gutenberg.org.
However, aside from the copyright owner, which is almost always the author or their publisher, ANYONE who posts, distributes, or transmits the text of these books online is violating both the U.S. and the International Copyright laws, infringing on Intellectual Property, and can be fined and jailed for it. (In general, anything first published within the last 52 years in the U.S. will still be in copyright. When the law was changed, it became copyright duration matched the rest of the work, i.e. the author’s/copyright owner’s lifetime plus 50 years.)
Writers make a living by creating their work. To read or use it without paying for it, is STEALING, pure and simple.
If the work is valuable enough to read, it must be paid for.
This is especially true of audiobooks since they are "performance" pieces and thus have their own and much more current copyrights.
Aside from being sued, anyone involved can be arrested, jailed, and fined for violation of both U.S. and International copyright laws, as well as under all the new laws protecting "Intellectual Property".
With ebooks, just as with hardcopies, a person buys that single copy, not the work, data, property, or text within. Those remain the property of the “copyright holder”. The copyright includes the right to copy, produce, manufacturer, transmit, distribute, and sell the work itself.
It’s like buying a mailing list. Someone can use the list to mail flyers to customers, but they cannot duplicate the list for re-sale or even give it away. The "property" belongs to someone else, and is considered theft of their work as much as if a person designs a new invention, patent it, and someone else steals their design, produces it, and sells it without them.
It’s amazing how much this simple law escapes questioners here.
