Librivox

I have been surfing the net for a while now, for at least the last 6 years, and I am still amazed at some of the awesome things I find out there.

This weekend I was in Toronto at a friend’s housewarming party when one of the guests mentioned that he liked to listen to audiobooks when he was driving. I confessed that I was a huge fan of audiobooks as well but I expressed my dismay at the cost of these books at the book store. Usually a good audio book will cost in the neighborhood of 40$, which is rather pricey. My friend, however, said he found a good resource on the net for getting free audio books.

So the resource he pointed me to is Librivox. Basically, Librivox is a website were volunteers will read books, record their readings, and post them on the internet to be shared, for free, with others. Unfortunately the only books they can allow to be read are those that are now in the public domain. The audio files can be downloaded to your computer and then moved around as you wish. You can put them on your mp3 player and listen to them on the bus or in your car. This is a great internet community project.

Another big advantage of the website is that it has an extensive and very good ‘FAQ’ section which explains all the how to’s involved with the project. It explains how to volunteer and read, (it even has tips on how to make the most of your reading experience).

So what are some of the downsides of the project? Well, like I said above it only has books that are now in the public domain. This means that the texts available tend to be somewhat older. The good thing is that many of these are what we consider ‘classics’.

A second downside is that the books aren’t read by professional actors. Many of the books have different readers for different chapters so it can be a bit confusing at times. Also the quality of the reading may not be the best as accents can ‘nuance’ the reading. Nevertheless, this is still a great community project that releases great information to people for free.

If your interested in checking it out, I suggest you do. Its worthwhile to download at least one file to check it out.

You never know, you might find an audio book, like George Costanza, that has a reader whose voices sounds exactly like yours! Let’s just hope it won’t drive you crazy like it did to George.

If your interested in checking it out, I suggest you do. Its worthwhile to download at least one file to check it out.

http://librivox.org/