LibriVox and Works in the Public Domain
About a month ago I was casting about for more audiobooks to listen to in the car with the kids. We had listened to everything we own from Audible more than once, and it seemed like it was high time for something new. I haven’t been all that impressed with the selection of Audible’s unabridged books that would be appropriate for children, so I was not really looking forward to perusing their catalog again. At about this time a thread came up on the Latin Centered Education Yahoo group and someone mentioned LibriVox. I had heard of it shortly before we moved and briefly looked into it, but with the chaos of the move and my lack of computer access, I had forgotten about it completely. I took another look and so far we’ve listened to Call of the Wild and we’re about half-way through Little Women. While the quality of the readers doesn’t tend to be as good as the professionals and the change in narrator at each chapter can occasionally be a little jarring, we’ve found the readers to all be at least decent and the quality of the recordings to be quite good. The most common problem is that the readers read a little too fast, but having done some voice work myself I know how hard it is to remember to slow down when you’re reading for a recording.
I would love to do some recording for this project myself, but I need to have a spare $30 for a microphone and some time without kid interruptions in order to do so… so I don’t think it will be happening anytime too soon. But if you’re looking for audio material I would definitely suggest giving LibriVox a look. Of course, everything they have is going to be older because it has to be in the public domain in order to be recorded, but there is a lot of great stuff out there!
And speaking of works in the public domain, I’ve been drooling over the Project Guttenburg catalog for quite some time. There’s so much there that I’d like to read, but I hate to read at my computer! I’ve considered printing some of it out to read, but that seems quite unwieldy. What I really want is one of those neat e-book readers (not that I’m sure they would even work with the Guttenburg texts), but the price tag is way too hefty for our budget at this point in our lives. And besides, doesn’t it seem a little silly to want something that costs several hundred dollars just so that I can read free books in the comfort of my bed?
mrsdarwin on 03 Mar 2008 at 11:35 am #
Not necessarily for kids, but if you’re looking at the LibriVox catalogue, check out Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Darwin read a chapter, though I can’t remember which one right off the top of my head.
mrsdarwin on 03 Mar 2008 at 11:38 am #
Here we go: it’s chapter 15. You can find it here.
amber on 03 Mar 2008 at 11:57 am #
Oh neat, good for him! I’ll have to give it a listen. What did he think of doing it? Is he thinking about doing any others?
mrsdarwin on 04 Mar 2008 at 8:45 am #
He enjoyed the recording (he just used the built-in microphone on our Mac), but it took a long time. And of necessity, it had to be done at nights after the girls were in bed. I think he’d like to do it again, but we’ll need to get several current projects out of the way first.
amber on 04 Mar 2008 at 10:23 am #
That’s something I wondered about - if it would end up taking a really long time to record one chapter. Sure, it might end up being a 20 minute recording, but what are the odds you could do it straight through without any problems?