Monday, June 6, 2011

Librivox.com

It's kind of Wikipedia for audio books. Its a web site to download audio versions of public domain books. What is really cool is that it is a user community where users suggest books and they and other volunteers record and post them chapter by chapter. The coordinator for any given project is in charge of quality control. There are hundreds of fiction and non-fiction, mostly pre-1923 and thus aut0omatically in the public domain but a few after that where the copyright has lapsed or not been renewed for some reason. There is a wide range of classics and sci fi among the stuff I have checked out so far. You then down load them as pod casts and listen at your leisure.

I am working my way through Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. The down side is that the quality of the readers and their accents varies widely. They range from several British women who sound quite posh to nasal midwesterners, a quite thick Australian accent, and a very annoying South Carolinian woman who reads painfully slowly and with the oddest pauses. Oh well, it still beats paying $60 for a download where I never would have taken the chance for that price range.

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