Click on the image below, choose a library then click on a book to have it read aloud to your student!
Ways to Get Free Online/Digital Books or Physical Books
You can access Big Universe Library from the OLS.
There are dozens of websites that provide free audiobooks and digital books. These sites don’t require that you “prove” your child has a reading issue, but the selection is usually limited to older classic books. Here are a few helpful sites.
How to Get Physical Books
- Storynory offers free audiobooks for young children. Titles include fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood and classics like Alice in Wonderland. Each audiobook includes the digital text of the book.
- Lit2Go provides free audiobook versions of books that are no longer protected by copyright laws. (Other sites, like LibriVox, provide a similar service.) Lit2Go offers downloadable PDFs of books so your child can read along as she listens to classics like The Call of the Wild. The site also categorizes books by reading level.
- Project Gutenberg is another option. You won’t find any recent bestsellers there. But you will find more than 50,000 free classic books in digital format. The majority are digital books that can be read with text-to-speech. To have them read aloud, your child must first download the free digital book to a computer or mobile device. Then she can use text-to-speech technology to have the book read aloud. (One option is to download books directly from Project Gutenberg to the Voice Dream Reader app.)
- Storyline Online The SAG-AFTRA Foundation records well-known actors reading children’s books and makes graphically dynamic videos so that children around the world can enjoy favorite stories, such as The Kissing Hand, A Bad Case of Stripes, and Stellaluna.
- Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 format.
- Storytime from Space is a project of the Global Space Education Foundation, which sends children’s books to the International Space Station. While in space, astronauts record themselves on video reading these books to the children of Earth and share them on the Story Time from Space website.
- Open Library is a part of the non-profit Internet Archive and offers access to some 20,000 free titles for children, including newer titles and classics.
- How to go to Big Universe in the OLS.
How to Get Physical Books
- Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is a unique book gifting program that mails a brand new, age-appropriate book to enrolled children every month from birth until five years of age, creating a home library of up to 60 books and instilling a love of books and reading from an early age. The cost of the books and the mailing is typically financed by community businesses, school districts, civic organizations, individuals, or local government.
- Reach Out and Read is a nonprofit organization that trains and supports medical providers who give books to children and advice to parents about the importance of reading aloud at well-child exams.
- Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) RIF’s flagship Books for Ownership program ensures that kids living in poverty have access to new, free books of their choice and participate in reading motivation activities.
- Reading Rockets has a great article on other options to get books.