LibriVox acoustical liberation of books in the public domain

LibriVox December 16th, 2005
I’ve always loved audio books. They’re a great way to work literature into your daily life without sacrificing a bunch of time turning pages. And let’s face it at the pace most of us live today, when do we have time to pick up a good book? But audio books are expensive, and free ones are hard to come by. Or so I thought. Today I discovered LibriVox, a not for profit organization that works with volunteers to convert literature in the public domain into downloadable audio content.

One of the things that I like about this service is that since it’s 100% volunteer work the voice of the person changes between chapter to chapter, giving the book an organic feel, and keeping your ears from acclimating to one persons voice. I find myself paying more attention to these recordings than I would with a product from say Penguin or one of the other big publishers.

And I was surprised at the quality of the recordings; they’re really quite good, especially being done by amateurs. You can get the downloads in two formats: MP3 and OGG, in 128kb & 64kb flavors. It’s worth a peek if you like audio books.