Bringing the "listening center" for elementary school kids into the 21st century?

I knew I came to the right place when the page loaded and found THIS at the top spot.

I am not a teacher but was approached by one, a family friend, this past weekend in regards to her "listening center"... or table where kids can read along with an audio book.

The problem she is running into is that technology is passing her by... the bulk of her materials are on cassette tape (and some on record!) as well as a handful of CDs. New books are increasingly unavailable on older formats and come digitally only. So it is time to move the whole lot into the modern age and digitize everything.

It seems, to me at least, a simple thing to digitize her existing audiobooks, load them onto her classroom computer or stash them online somewhere, come up with a few mp3 players (and mounts to keep them from leaving the building), and get her a microphone and the software needed to record her own versions of books (in the event she wants to include titles for which there is no readily available audio component).

So I come to you, teachers of reddit, and I ask two questions:

1.) Is there already a service or group out there that makes this sort of content available to teachers that she simply hasn't heard of? (and if not, seriously, why the hell not?)

2.) If no such service exists do any of you have experience setting this sort of thing up? What I am not thinking considering? Is there extra functionality you use in your classroom you highly recommend I build into this?

Thanks in advance for any help or advice you might have for me. I really appreciate it.

tl;dr: I am going to hook this Kindergarten Teacher up with a new fangled way to allow her kids to read along with audio books, how should I do it?