  The Schwarzschild black hole can be viewed as the special case of the
marginally bound Lema\^\i tre-Tolman-Bondi models of dust collapse which
corresponds to a constant mass function. We have presented a midi-superspace
quantization of this model for an arbitrary mass-function in a separate
publication. In this communication we show that our solution leads both to
Bekenstein's area spectrum for black holes as well as to the black hole
entropy, which, in this context, is naturally interpreted as the loss of
information of the original matter distribution within the collapsing dust
cloud.
