Hi

To record spoken word is not very demanding so a reasonable quality mike especially a USB should work well.

Concerning format - you should consider what will be your most likely playback medium. CD audio is playable on a wide variety of equipment MP3 is playable on fewer types of equipment but requires smaller files.

It is easily possible to convert WAV files to CD or MP3 but can be a little time consuming to do much editing. Remember it is always worthwhile to do another backup while CD-Rs are so cheap.

It should be possible to produce discs playable on DVD machines with both audio and pictures, but I have not experimented with that myself