Alan Bell

April 29, 2006

I am a father of 3 who likes reading bedtime stories. My kids like listening and demand more stories than I can manage so I started recording stories and burning them to CD so that they can play back stories whenever they like. I figured it would be cool to share these recordings with other people, and play back stories read by other people to my kids. I am a software developer by trade, so I thought it would be fun to set up a little website to share these readings, and now I have: www.astoryforbedtime.com. I have got permission from several publishers to share recordings of their books, it is just a hobby really, there are no adverts on the site, but there are links to the books on Amazon which was the price I paid to get the permissions from the publishers. I am particularly interested in the benefits to children from hearing diverse accents from all over the world at an early age. I think this could help development of listening, and make it easier for them to follow a conversation. There has also been some interest from the deaf community, the stories might be useful in aiding listening development for hearing children of deaf adults.

I am now trying to get the word out about the site all over the world, and a friend of mine told me about your readings on NPR and he thought you might like the site and perhaps mention it to your listeners. Do please take a look at it, and download as many as you like, oh and if you feel like recording and sending in a reading of anything then that would be fantastic too!

Sounds like fun!