Monday, July 24, 2006

librivox.org

Ah, collaboration. Ain't it grand?! How the internet lets folks get together to do all kinds of neat stuff. Write Open Source software, search for aliens from another planet, write an encyclopedia.

Or record free audio books. I recently found librivox.org, which is a collaborative effort to "record all the books in the public domain". A grand ambition, but they've already release over 100 books, and lots of other shorter works and poetry collections as well. I'm currently listening to their recording of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus", which I'll blog about once I finish.

They're approaching their 1st anniversary, and had a short poem, "Art and Heart" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, that they wanted as many recordings of as possible, so I gave it a shot, and it was quite fun. And to follow up with that, I just signed up to record a couple of chapters out of Dumas's "The Count of Monte Cristo". I saw and liked the movie a while back, and as they were/are looking for readers, I thought I'd give it a try.

One cool thing about their approach is that you don't have to be a professional "voice talent" to do this. They aren't fussy at all about pronunciations, especially in works like Monte Cristo with lots of French and other foreign names. They even say that different pronunciations by different readers is "part of the Librivox charm".

It's a great place to find stuff to listen to on my commute, and helping out with the recording is a neat way to say thanks.

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