Public domain books + volunteer readers + podcast = Librivox. Starting this week, LibriVox will try to bring people together to record a chapter of a well-known book, which will then be distributed over the internet. Or, in the group’s words: “LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain.”
The book that the organizers chose this week is Joseph Conrad‘s The Secret Agent. The recordings will in turn be placed in the public domain, and should end up at the Internet Archive.
Akma once successfully organized a similar project as a one-off where Larry Lessig’s book Free Culture was read out loud.
See Telltale Weekly and the Spoken Alexandria Project for a similar group.
There is also Audio Books For Free, which looks like a similar enterprise as Telltale Weekly, but which donates its audiobooks to Project Gutenberg instead of to the Spoken Alexandria Project.
while audiobooksforfree.com has a recorded Secret Agent, on gutenberg it’s a computer-generated audio book. also the audiobooksforfree isn’t quite free. but the idea here is to get podcasters all involved in a collective project, and podcast books … a bit different though the end result should be the same. and, again, it’s free free free, not sort of free, which is at least a bit different. i’ll be getting in touch with the other guys though.
cheers, librivox.
I want to read aloud for the project – how do I do it?
Hi, Catherine. Get the info here. Best of luck with your reading! – David