A couple of days ago I send a question to Humble Bundle, asking if, considering they've sold DRM-free audiobooks, they're aware of any place that sells them. I got a reply from a support person quickly, saying that she's not aware of one but that a Google search brings up some relevant results. So I googled and found Downpour.

I searched for this before, perhaps didn't find it because Downpour is rather new, or because my google-foo was bad. Either way, I'm happy that the response I got put me on the right track. Getting quick help from a real person about something unrelated to the business is cool in my book.

they actually DO sell drm free audiobooks
but not often

last year i boght the doctor who audobook bundle
and the whoel thing was drm free and i had direct acces to the mp3's

Took them 7 days, twice, to reply to my tickets.

Not a pleasant experience dealing with Humble Support.

Yeah, that's what made me want more audiobooks. I started with the Scholastic bundle, listened to the Hunger Games trilogy and enjoyed it, but didn't know where to get more books. (Interestingly, Downpour went online a little before that, but for some reason I didn't find it.) I listened to a couple of other books and then started listening to The Dalek Empire, and that had so many daleks in it that it was terribly grating (Daleks are a fine enemy, but listening to them is grrrrr...). That's when I got another urge to search for DRM-free audiobooks to listen to. Yes, response time is pretty variable, could be under an hour, could be a week. Had times all over the place.

Regardless of the time, they always seem to want to help, which is not to be taken for granted.

well to be honest if you want drm free audiobooks your best bet is to hit ebay and buy the actual cd's or tapes your self
rip them and create your own audiobooks

thats what i do

I feel that downloads are more convenient. Even though Downpour was very very slow for me (2+ hours for a book), I still had the book available in the morning. That would never happen with eBay. Plus I can browse the store, find books of certain genres, that's not something I could easily do on eBay.

i suppose
but true drm free is when you buy the actual cd's and rip them your self

If I download, burn to CD and then rip it, would that be good enough for you?

you asked for drm free
getting the cd is the ultimate option because then you can do what you want with it
rip it as wav files
as mp3's
build the audio book anyway you want
you are beholden to nobody except the limits of what you want ;p

And I got it. I have the book on CD right now. In fact, I have three books (in MP3 format) on that CD. You could argue quality, but DRM-free?

Frankly if I was okay with the inconvenience of uncompressed CD I could have gone the Audible way, because Audible, DRM-laden as it is, does have the ability to create audio CD's from an audiobook and so get DRM-free copies that way. But I'd rather pay more and get a convenient copy that's already in MP3 format.

If I could, I would burn all audio books.

If I could, I would buy Fahrenheit 451 on Downpour, but it's not available in my country.

Following snowkatt's advice I figured I could get it on eBay, but prices there are ridiculous when shipping is included.

I've had pretty good experiences with Humble support. When they had the bundle with Starbound, I bought it within the first minute, when it was still available, but by the time my payment went through it was gone. I got an email from them the next day telling me they added it.

Also when I emailed asking them if there was any way I could get the first humble bundle, they said no, but it was a fairly speedy response.