[bksvol-discuss] O_T Volunteers Read Audiobooks Available for Free Downloading

"Shelley L. Rhodes" <juddysbuddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> · Sat, 02 Sep 2006 12:43:24 -0400

Some might find this helpful, all of the books mentioned are in the public 
domain.

At least in the U.S. if you want a book still in copyright, then you have to 
use

Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic, Bookshare.org, or the National 
Library Service.

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This is a lengthy post:
Volunteers Read Audiobooks Available for Free Downloading -
New York Times

Article Tools Sponsored By
By CRAIG SILVERMAN
Published: August 25, 2006
Jacqueline Bohnert for The New York Times

Kara Shallenberg and her son, Henry, who have joined the effort to
record and distribute their book readings for LibriVox.

Related

A Guide to Audiobook Projects: Spreading the Literary Word
(August 25, 2006)

Readers' Opinions

Forum: Book News and Reviews

Correction Appended

Kara Shallenberg and her 10-year-old son, Henry, exhausted the audiobook
collection at their library in Oceanside, Calif., five years ago. With
Henry's
appetite for listening still strong, Ms. Shallenberg began to record
herself reading his favorite books. Eventually she upgraded from a using
a tape deck
to burning CD's on her laptop computer. Last fall she took her hobby to
a wider audience.

Ms. Shallenberg's recordings of "The Secret Garden," "The Tale of Peter
Rabbit" and other works are now available, free, to anyone with an
Internet connection
and basic audio software. She is part of a core group of volunteers who
give their voices and spare time to LibriVox, a project that produces
audiobooks
of works in the public domain.

"Everything I read to Henry was copyrighted," Ms. Shallenberg said,
adding that she was frustrated she couldn't share those works. "The idea
of creating
audiobooks that other people could enjoy was exciting."

LibriVox is the largest of several emerging collectives that offer free
or inexpensive audiobooks of works whose copyrights have expired, from
Plato to
"The Wind in the Willows." (In the United States, this generally means
anything published or registered for copyright before 1923.) The results
range from
solo readings done by amateurs in makeshift home studios to high-quality
recordings read by actors or professional voice talent.

At its worst a free audiobook can sound like a teenager reading aloud in
high school English class. At its best it can offer excellent sound
quality and
skilled narration infused with a passion for the text. In between is a
world of competent readings, sometimes spiced with affected accents,
mumbled words
and distant car horns and reflecting all manner of literary
interpretations.

LibriVox celebrated its anniversary on Aug. 10, around the same time it
surpassed the 100-book mark. It also offers more than 200 recordings of
short stories,
plays, speeches, poems and documents like the Magna Carta and the
Declaration of Independence. By comparison the audiobook industry, which
typically sells
recordings for $15 to $30, released 3,430 titles, taking in $832
million, in 2004, the last year for which figures are available.

LibriVox's founder, Hugh McGuire, 32, a software developer and writer in
Montreal, said there were another 100 works in development, all of which
would
be recorded, edited and uploaded by volunteers.

"The principles of the project are to be totally noncommercial, totally
ad free, totally volunteer and totally public domain," he said. Readers
can volunteer
at the Web site,
librivox.org.

One of LibriVox's colleagues in the free audiobook realm is Telltale
Weekly (
telltaleweekly.org),
which sells recordings for 25 cents to $8, but makes them available at
no charge through its Spoken Alexandria Project (
spokenalex.org)
after five years or 100,000 downloads, whichever comes first. It was
founded in 2004 by Alex Wilson, a writer and actor in Chapel Hill, N.C.,
who performs
many of the readings. Another service, LiteralSystems (
literalsystems.org),
has 51 works available for free download and emphasizes their
professional quality.

The audio format of choice for each service is MP3 (though Spoken
Alexandria and LibriVox offer other options), which means the audiobooks
can play on any
computer and most digital music players. Unlike with commercial
audiobooks, listeners are free to copy and share the recordings.

All three services rely on Project Gutenberg (
gutenberg.org),
the online repository of works in the public domain, for texts.
Listeners often can choose from several recordings of the same work;
LibriVox, for example,
offers three readings of the Gettysburg Address. Among the most recorded
authors are Jane Austen,
Mark Twain,
Herman Melville,
Jack London, L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll,
William Shakespeare
and Lucy Maud Montgomery ("Anne of Green Gables").

LibriVox's volunteers, who record solo or in collaboration, are
restricted in their material only to previously published works in the
public domain in
the United States. This open policy has let the personal preferences of
readers shine through, Mr. McGuire said.

"If someone turned up with a smut book from 1850, we would do it," he
said. "We did 'Fanny Hill,' which is an early erotic Victorian book.
Everyone was
laughing in the discussion forums about having to keep quiet while
recording so their kids wouldn't hear them."

Other LibriVoxers have proposed reading the Koran (some have already
read chapters of the Bible), recording Supreme Court decisions and
reciting pi to an
unknown, but you can assume lengthy, number of digits. A multilingual
recording of the
United Nations
' Universal Declaration of Human Rights is underway, as is a full cast
recording of "The Pirates of Penzance."

While some listeners object to the wide variety of recording quality,
Mr. McGuire said, "our take on it is if you think a recording is done
badly, then
please do one and we'll post it as well."

LibriVox has more than 1,800 registered volunteers, and its audience
continues to grow.

"Last week I listened to an early
Agatha Christie
novel as I shopped for groceries, chopped vegetables, sewed a hem or
took my walk," Arlene Goldbard, a New York writer and social activist,
wrote on her
blog after enjoying her first LibriVox recording in June.

The other free audiobook services are more centralized in their
administration, often with one person doing most of the work and
recording (meaning listeners
had better enjoy that person's voice and narration style). They tend to
select works with the best chance of gaining mass appeal, and put an
emphasis on
maintaining consistent production values.

Warren Smith, the founder of LiteralSystems, searches out local actors
and voice talent in Santa Fe, N.M., where he lives. He also actively
seeks donations
and sponsorships to finance his work and help pay performers.

"I started with a MiniDisc recorder and now have a little 8-by-8-foot
recording studio," he said. "The end focus is matching commercial
quality," while
keeping the recordings free.

Over the last year Ms. Shallenberg has read more than 200 individual
chapters and six novels for LibriVox, in addition to shorter works. She
also turned
her son Henry from an audiobook fan to a budding voice talent who has
recorded some of Aesop's fables.

"I would be surprised if he didn't keep doing recordings, because he
loves audiobooks," she said. "When you love something that much, you
want to get involved."

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