Public Domain Audio Books: Librivox

Audio books account for a small but significant part of the market for books and with the rise of the mp3 player the opportunities for listening to literature are ever expanding. If you want recent books then the decent thing to do is pay for a copy and keep the writer in business. But for out of copyright work Librivox could be the way to go. Librivox offers free public domain audio books. One of the great things about the project is that it is all done by volunteers and the work is shared.

Hugh McGuire, founder of Librivox, had this to say in an interview on the Creative Commons website:

The immediate reason was practical — I was going on a long drive and I was looking for free public domain audiobooks on the Net; there weren’t very many, and I thought there should be.

But other than that practical need I wanted to address, LibriVox came out of a few conceptual strands. The first was the idealism of the free software movement, and it’s pragmatic success. Here was a parallel system (to the proprietary software system) built almost entirely out of volunteer effort, and hugely successful to boot. I was very interested in how free software ideals and methodologies could be applied to non-software projects: could the same sorts of ideas be used in the real world?

Here's the link to Librivox.

Posted by Chris, Powered by Qumana