Jewel in the Open Content Crown Needs Help

Far too few people know about LibriVox:

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.

Think about that: turning all public domain books into free audio books. That would be a wonderful resource, and not just for the visually impaired, for whom it is a tremendous boon.

But as is often the case, this fine project is put together by volunteers, with no funding, and that's now a problem:

For four-and-a-half years, LibriVox volunteers have been making audiobooks for the world to enjoy, and giving them away for free. We’ve made thousands of free audiobooks that have been downloaded by millions of people; our site gets 400,000 visitors every month. To date, all our costs have been borne by a few individuals, with some generous donations from partners. However, these costs have become too big.

All they need is $20,000 - a paltry sum for such an incomparably rich holding. Please use the "Donate Now" button on their site to give to them so that they can continue to give to us immeasurably more.

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Long Live LibriVox

To my shame, I only discovered the wonderful LibriVox recently. Now it's passed a milestone in its short history:

Well, we did it. We just cataloged our 1,000th book, and for that a huge thank you must go out to everyone who has ever said or written the word LibriVox. Thank you first to the readers for lending their voices to something wonderful; to the Book Coordinators who pull things together; to the Meta Coordinators who get all this audio up on the net; to the Moderators who keep things running smoothly on our forum. And of course the other people: the proof listeners, the catalog development team, the web site designers and fixers, and all the forum volunteers of every stripe.

And more: to our listeners, and supporters, to Dan for keeping the servers running; to the Internet Archive for providing hosting for all our media, which makes it all possible; to Project Gutenberg (and other public domain projects) for liberating all this wonderful text onto the web.

And of course a big thank you to all our families and friends who live with our varying levels of LibriVox addiction.

Interesting to note that LibriVox feeds (in the nicest possible way) off Project Gutenberg, another great digital commons. Interesting, too, to see that they call LibriVox an "addiction"; that's what makes these projects so great: sheer, unadulterated dependancy.... (Via Michael Geist.)

Set My Libri Free

Everybody knows about Project Gutenberg, which aims to provide texts of as many public domain books as possible. One freedom that is available for such texts is to create spoken versions of them. Librivox is aiming to do just that:

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (through a podcast, catalog, and bit torrents). We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project, and we operate almost exclusively through Internet communications.

...

We get most of our texts from Project Gutenberg, and the Internet Archive and ibiblio.org host our audio files.

Not only that, but it offers its files in both the well-known - but proprietary - MP3 format, as well as the less well-known but free and deliciously-named ogg format. Another unexpected plus of the project, is that it can offer several versions of the same text, allowing all kinds of interesting comparisons to be made - to say nothing of cool reworkings.

There is also a small but select group of texts in languages other than English. (Via Creative Commons.)