LibriVox
LibriVox (pronounced [ˈlibrɪˌvɑks]) is an online digital library of free public domain audiobooks, read by volunteers and is probably, since 2007, the world's most prolific audiobook publisher. The LibriVox objective is "to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet".
In December 2010, it had a catalogue of over 4,500 unabridged books and shorter works available to download and produced on average 90 audiobooks per month.[4] Around ninety percent of the collection is in English, although LibriVox recordings are available in 33 languages altogether.
History
LibriVox was started in August 2005 by Montreal-based writer Hugh McGuire, who set up a blog, and posed the question. The initial response to this question was positive enough that the first LibriVox recording was made available in MP3 format within a month of the blog going live. It was a recording of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, with chapters recorded by McGuire and eleven volunteers who had been attracted by the blog.
In October 2005, LibriVox acquired its own URL (librivox.org), on which McGuire set up a web forum, and the number of volunteers and works made available began steadily to grow. A total of 30 books were recorded and released through the website by the end of the year.
By late 2006, the site was releasing around 30 books per month, and coverage of the project on the Internet and in the traditional press saw the number of volunteers recording for the site move into the hundreds.
By January 2009, over 2,000 Librivox books and short works had been published, using the voices of 2,400 volunteers. By December 2010, the total was 4,000, using the voices of nearly 4,000 volunteers from around the world.
The main features of the way LibriVox works have changed little since its inception, although the technology that supports it has been improved by the efforts of those of its volunteers with web-development skills.
LibriVox brings together volunteers to read books in the public domain which they offer as free audio book downloads on MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. They've recorded hundreds of unabridged audio books, short stories, and poems, focusing primarily on classic fiction. Most of their audio books feature collaborations from multiple narrators, while some of their titles are read by a solo narrator. The quality of their narrators varies significantly depending on the reader's voice and the audio recording. Check out LearnOutLoud.com's article Guide to LibriVox Audio Books to read brief reviews of the quality of individual LibriVox projects.
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