Thank you for all you did, Michael.

Here is his obituary.

Set during WWI in England, The Red Planet is a rich tale about the life in a little English town from the point of view of Major Duncan Meredyth, a disabled veteran of the Boer Wars. As he struggles to keep his life and the lives of those he cares for in harmony, he must also shelter a dark secret regarding one of the village’s favorite sons.

Our yearly rate of completion of projects since we started in August 2005 is the following:

• 2005: 30
• 2006: 358
• 2007: 728
• 2008: 884
• 2009: 1002 (and counting)

We currently offer 1 year, 329 days, 9 hours, 7 minutes, and 0 seconds worth of free public domain audio, or 61,234 completed sections of audio cataloged.

More LibriVox stats:

• Total number of completed projects: 3002
• Number of completed non-English projects: 430
• Number of languages with a completed work: 27
• Number of completed solo projects: 1402
• Number of readers: 3323

A hearty thank-you & congratulations to all.

For those of you listening, perhaps you would like to join us?

Canadians are also playing a leading role in reshaping the creation of audiobooks. Hugh McGuire, a Montreal-based writer and Web developer, established LibriVox in August 2005. The site is also based on concept of Internet collaboration. In this instance, LibriVox volunteers create voice recordings of chapters of books that are in the public domain. The resulting audio files are posted back on to the Internet for free.

The LibriVox project, which does not have an annual budget, has succeeded in placing more than 1,200 audio books on the Internet, including Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, works from Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and hundreds more.

Que les curieux aillent donc écouter le premier chapitre du ” Tour du monde en 80 jours “de Jules Verne. Le plaisir simple de se laisser conter une histoire par une voix inconnue à l’intonation claire et à la diction irréprochable est irrésistible.

[link...]

Audiobooks are ridiculously expensive: The latest “Harry Potter” title lists at $80 on CD. Librivox, however, provides pod fodder for free. The site features a collection of public-domain books read by volunteers—and anyone can volunteer. The audio quality is good (MP3s at 64 or 128 Kbps, as well as OGG Vorbis files). Some narrators are better than others—some may have listened to a little too much NPR—but almost everything is at least decent, and some performances are quite good. The collection (a bit more than 800 Project Gutenberg works so far) is a bit of a hodgepodge, with everything from Walt Whitman to Edgar Rice Burroughs. You’ll have to wait about a hundred years for The Deathly Hallows, though.

[link...]

I wonder if we can crack the list of top 100 discovered web sites next year?

The list of titles is not as long as I would like, but it is growing all the time and the quality of the recordings is generally very good.

And as with all such comments, we make an open invitation to all BBC listeners, watchers, readers, employees, and freelancers, Kate Russell included, to join us and help us make that catalog bigger!

The article includes comments from Jimmy Wales, and Audible.com’s CEO, among others.

Juicy bit:

It’s not that they don’t care about listeners … it’s that LibriVox, as its most fundamental level, isn’t about consumption. It’s about making stuff.

The Wealth of LibriVox: Classic texts, amateur audiobooks, and the grand future of online peer production
by Michael Erard.

Yet another site that contributes to Gutenberg, LibriVox.org, uses volunteers to read public domain books, aloud, creating free audio books.

In a nice, um, twist, the interview took place in the back stacks in the basement of the Atwater Library, where I serve on the Board. The books make for great sound dampers. I was pitching another project, the Atwater Digital Literacy Project to Mitch, and I convinced him to join the Advisory Committee.