In 2005, Hugh McGuire asked:
“Can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting?”
The answer is yes. Thanks to the help of many, LibriVox, the nonprofit organization he leads, has made tremendous progress in producing and distributing free audiobooks of public domain work.
The LibriVox site has recently undergone a major facelift, making it far easier to browse and find great public domain audiobooks. In addition, the underlying software that helps thousands of volu
nteers contribute to LibriVox has been completely rebuilt. This rebuild project was funded by the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and donations from the public. LibriVox continues to use the Internet Archive to host all it’s audio and web infrastructure.
Thanks to:
The thousands of volunteer readers who bring over 100 new books a month originally in Project Gutenberg, and other public domain sources (including, of course, the Internet Archive) to the listening public.
With over 7,000 audio books, LibriVox is one of the largest publishers of audiobooks in the world, and certainly the largest publisher of free public domain audiobooks.
The Millions of Listeners who download over three million LibriVox audiobooks every month.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Don Waters at their Scholarly Communications and Information Technology programme, for providing funding for the revamp of the LibriVox website, and underlying technology that runs the project.
Free Hosting by the Internet Archive.
Pro bono Legal services from Diana Szego of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.
And the relentless good cheer of Hugh McGuire who over the last eight years has created this fabulous service, and continued to make contributions to open (e)book publishing with PressBooks.com. @hughmcguire
Please donate!
This project needs ongoing support for servers and software upgrades.
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Librivox is a great idea, but it has for me one big failing. That is the full ‘commercial’ being required at the beginning of each chapter being read. To be honest this is plain irritating and I switch off after about the third chapter – no matter how well it is being read.
I realise there are often multiple readers, but couldn’t these be credited at the opening and the info on Librivox – and also at the end if felt a good idea?
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Track one love
I’ve been working on a mobile app for LibriVox, as well: You can find them at: LibriVox Audio Books (click on the iOS or Android app link on the left side of the page)
The problem with LibriVox is so many of the volunteers can barely read. I’m not saying that to be a jerk, I tried to listen to The Count of Monte Cristo, the reader of like 20 consecutive chapters was clearly in the process of learning english (which is great, but makes it impossible to stay engaged).
I guess you get what you pay for. 🙁
Are you kidding? David clarke is a great reader!
Perhaps you mistook his correct pronunciation of the french locales for incorrect english!
Clearly we need a more educated listener.
Re: The Count of Monte Cristo “…the reader of like 20 consecutive chapters was clearly in the process of learning english…
The narrator has a beautiful voice and pronounces the location names beautifully! Surely you jest! He speaks so well, I wish more narrators sound the same as he.
I must agree with George, the previous poster, in this case. David Clarke has a gorgeous reading voice.
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I am so grateful for this service. I use it on a regular basis while I grade papers. I can listen to something I enjoy while getting my work done. Thank you !
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