LibriVox » Uncategorized http://librivox.org free public domain audiobooks Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:41:56 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Our Readers’ Favourites – Old and New http://librivox.org/2010/03/18/our-readers-favourites-old-and-new/ http://librivox.org/2010/03/18/our-readers-favourites-old-and-new/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:46:10 +0000 LibriVox Admin Team http://librivox.org/?p=9702 Here are some suggestions from the heart of our LibriVox community – audio books which have given our readers particular pleasure to listen to.

We have three versions of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in our catalogue, with two more recordings in progress. It is clearly a book which many readers want to record. Our first version, which was a collaborative project with over a dozen different readers, was released only 6 months after LibriVox started, and is still one of our most popular downloads.

John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps has been adapted for several films and television productions, but in a member’s view none measure up to the original book. Here we offer you Adrian Praetzellis’ recording. As a reviewer says: “His voice characterisations were first class…”

All you mathematicians out there will know that it was Pi Day on March 14th, but have you heard our ground-breaking The First Fifty Digits of Pi? A true feast – the first 50 digits served up by 56 readers each to his/her own recipe.

March 14th was also the birthday of Albert Einstein, and you can hear an introduction to Einstein’s space-bending, time-stretching theory of Relativity, written by the master himself at Relativity: The Special and General Theory.

If that is rather heavy fare, how about a light snack of short stories? The Parenticide Club by Ambrose Bierce, read by Peter Yearsley, consists of four grotesque short stories about murder within the family.

Not to be missed is The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, superbly read by Elaine Tweddle.

Also highly recommended is J. M. Smallheer’s reading of a top ten bestseller of 1906, The House of a Thousand Candles by Meredith Nicholson. If you like mystery, adventure and romance, you will love this.

If you prefer science fiction, The Door Through Space, an early work of Marion Zimmer Bradley, may be to your taste. When the door swings open, erstwhile Terran Intelligence agent Race Cargill finds himself facing a plot designed to destroy the Terran Empire. Read by Christie Nowak and Clive Catterall.

Notable for its vivid descriptions of the eponymous hero (no mean feat!) The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells is a classic of science fiction. This version from 2006 is read by Alex Foster.

H. P. Lovecraft lists among his greatest influences works by William Hope Hodgson including The House on the Borderland. This recording, by Alan Winterrowd, has been highly recommended by aficionados of the horror and fantasy genres.

And for a little bonne bouche at the end of this banquet of fine things, here is some delicious poetry: Selected Poems by Christina & Dante Gabriel Rossetti, read for you by Leonard Wilson.

All previous listening suggestions may also be found on the Recommended Listening List in the LibriVox Wiki.

If you have a favourite recording you would like me to include next time, feel free to leave a comment here or visit us on this forum thread What are your favourite recordings? and tell us about it.

]]> http://librivox.org/2010/03/18/our-readers-favourites-old-and-new/feed/ 0 LibriVox Needs Your Help http://librivox.org/2010/02/24/librivox-needs-your-help/ http://librivox.org/2010/02/24/librivox-needs-your-help/#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:23:59 +0000 hugh http://librivox.org/?p=8932 UPDATE: We’ve reached our objective. Thank you everybody! More info here.

Dearest LibriVox listeners, volunteers, & supporters:

For four-and-a-half years, LibriVox volunteers have been making audiobooks for the world to enjoy, and giving them away for free. We’ve made thousands of free audiobooks that have been downloaded by millions of people; our site gets 400,000 visitors every month. To date, all our costs have been borne by a few individuals, with some generous donations from partners. However, these costs have become too big.

See below to FIND OUT HOW TO DONATE (Or, keep reading!).


LibriVox needs your help.

We’re asking for donations for the following:

  • to cover hosting costs for our website (about $5,000/year)*, which includes:

    • the site you are reading now;
    • the forum;
    • the wiki;
    • the catalog;
    • a whole lot of back-end software to host and process audio before it goes to the Internet Archive
    • but does NOT include hosting audio files which is done by Archive.org
  • to redesign the site and improve its accessibility
  • to make the LibriVox catalog easier for listeners to use
  • to make the management software easier for admins to use

We expect this fund-raising drive to sustain us for three years at least.


Your donation will support the work of our volunteers.

Our fundraising goal is $20,000. After we reach it, we’ll shut down our fundraising campaign. And we hope we can make it another 4.5 years without having to bother you again!

HOW TO DONATE:

  1. Visit the Internet Archive donation page (the Internet Archive, a registered US charity and friend of LibriVox, is managing our fundraising campaign)
  2. Select a donation method** (Justgive.org, Paypal, or Check)
  3. Be sure to write: “Donation for LibriVox” along with your donation (otherwise we won’t get the donation!)
  4. Don’t forget to write: “Donation for LibriVox” along with your donation!

*NOTE: From our great sysadmin Dan, regarding server costs:
For a variety of reasons, we require a full dedicated server, or at least a very high-end VM with several hundred GB of storage. Though we don’t host the files for end-user download, we do provide an uploading service which book contributors use to share individual chapters and other similar things.

Combine that with lots of wordpress/phpBB modifications, and pretty high wordpress/phpBB traffic, and we fill up a server pretty fast.

In short: Hundreds of GB storage + ~1800 gigabytes Internet transfer per month + heavy MySQL usage adds up to a pretty expensive server or high-end VM. Note that none of this includes projected growth, we will need more resources soon, and that’s also a factor in the dollar amount Hugh mentioned.

I’d also like to point out that the figure does not cover sysadmin support. I work for free. And my job is a lot harder when I have to deal with an intermediary sysadmin, which some hosting companies force upon you. Where we are right now, I myself am root.

**NOTE: From the Internet Archive (who is kindly administering this campaign for us): Please reassure your donors that we do not sell our mailing list nor send unsolicited mail out.

]]> http://librivox.org/2010/02/24/librivox-needs-your-help/feed/ 138 It’s Christmas time again! http://librivox.org/2009/12/24/its-christmas-time-again/ http://librivox.org/2009/12/24/its-christmas-time-again/#comments Thu, 24 Dec 2009 10:28:00 +0000 LibriVox Admin Team http://librivox.org/?p=7810 Here are some suggestions for family Christmas listening:

Stories with a Christmas theme:

A short book, perfect for younger listeners, read by Kara Shallenberg: Christmas Holidays at Merryvale by Alice Hale Burnett.

The Christmas Angel by Abbie Farwell Brown, very much in the spirit of Dickens’ Christmas stories, read by Jan MacGillivray.

The Birds’ Christmas Carol by Kate Douglas Wiggin, a charming story of Christmas cheer.

Old Christmas by Washington Irving, a tale of the quaint and old English traditions of celebrating Christmas.

Christmas Eve ghost stories Told after Supper by Jerome K. Jerome at his tongue-in-cheek best, read by Ruth Golding.

“If you don’t like Christmas stories, don’t read this one! And if you don’t like dogs I don’t know just what to advise you to do!” says Eleanor Hallowell Abbott, author of Peace On Earth, Good-Will To Dogs, read by Allyson Hester.

A grumpy gent learning the lesson of Christmas in Santa Claus’s Partner by Thomas Nelson Page.

Two versions of The Spirit of Christmas, a group of stories, essays and prayers by Henry van Dyke.

… and no Christmas would be complete without Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, of which we now have two English versions and a Dutch, Een Kerstlied in Proza.

Christmas poetry

Music On Christmas Morning by Anne Bronte

Twas the Night Before Christmas by Clement C. Moore. There is also now a new selection of readings of this much loved poem.

Christmas carols:

Christmas Carol Collection 2009, a collection of 30 traditional Christmas carols performed in a variety of styles, and also the 2006 Carol Collection.

Christmas carols, stories and poems

Other collections which include Christmas Carols, as well as seasonal stories and poems, include:

As we at Librivox approach with great excitement the release of our 1000th audiobook of 2009 and our 3000th in total, we wish you all a very merry Christmas and a peaceful and happy New Year.

]]> http://librivox.org/2009/12/24/its-christmas-time-again/feed/ 1 July: mmm… summer, strawberries and audiobooks in the sun. http://librivox.org/2009/08/01/july-mmm-summer-strawberries-and-audiobooks-in-the-sun/ http://librivox.org/2009/08/01/july-mmm-summer-strawberries-and-audiobooks-in-the-sun/#comments Sat, 01 Aug 2009 09:04:43 +0000 LibriVox Admin Team http://librivox.org/?p=5437 What delicious offerings did we have for you in July? A wide range, as usual:

“Doc” Smith’s space opera Triplanetary, eagerly awaited by all fans of reader Mark F. Smith.

The Sea Wolf and The Scarlet Plague by Jack London.

Eight recordings for children, including By Pond and River by Arabella Buckley, Baum’s The Magic of Oz and The Magic City by E. Nesbit.

Religion and philosophy, including St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, Part Two, and The Autobiography of Madame Guyon, French mystic and advocate of Quietism.

101 years after the opening of Maria Montessori’s first Children’s House we have recorded the first English translation of The Montessori Method.

Volume One of one of the longest novels in the English Language the epistolary Clarissa by Samuel Richardson.

Stephen Leacock’s Nonsense Novels.

Murder mystery Madame Midas by Fergus Hume, always a popular author here.

The strange and wonderful The First Book of Urizen by William Blake, and the equally strange and wonderful post-apocalyptic classic After London by Richard Jefferies.

As usual, of course, there are short stories, poetry, Sci-Fi (Collections 20 and 21), and Ghost and Horror stories.

We have catalogued works in Chinese, Hebrew, Swedish, Dutch and German.

And much, much more: for all works catalogued during July, please see this page.

Next month, during which we celebrate Librivox’s 4th birthday, I shall return to some lesser-known recordings from our first four years.

]]> http://librivox.org/2009/08/01/july-mmm-summer-strawberries-and-audiobooks-in-the-sun/feed/ 0 More ideas for listening http://librivox.org/2009/04/30/more-ideas-for-listening/ http://librivox.org/2009/04/30/more-ideas-for-listening/#comments Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:02:21 +0000 LibriVox Admin Team http://librivox.org/?p=4003 The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim.
Four women leave dreary post-WWI London for a month in an Italian castle. Highly recommended by listeners. Read by Diana Kiesners.

Multilingual Poetry Collection 004.
Poems in Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Latin, Latvian, Portuguese, Russian and Turkish.

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens.
A wonderful recording of one of Dickens’ masterpieces. Read by Mil Nicholson.

The Magic World by E. Nesbit.
An enchanting and timeless collection of short stories by this much-loved author. Read by Ruth Golding.

King Lear by William Shakespeare.
This recording marked the 400th anniversary of the first performance of the play on December 26th 1606, and still holds the Librivox record for a major dramatic work – being completed in just a week.

History of the United States, Vol. I: The Colonial Period by Charles and Mary Beard.
The first volume of this seven-part work by the most influential American historian of the early 20th century. Volumes II – V are also available, and Volume VI is currently being recorded.

Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf von Immanuel Kant.
In der Abhandlung „Zum ewigen Frieden” wendet Kant die Grundsätze seiner Moralphilosophie auf die Beziehungen zwischen Staaten an. Aufgenommen von Christian Al-Kadi.

The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales by John Charles Dent.
Spooky stories read by Moira Fogarty.

White Fang by Jack London.
Written as a companion to Jack London’s successful Call of the Wild (1903), this is the tale of a wild dog born in the wild and eventually brought to civilization.

Have fun!

]]> http://librivox.org/2009/04/30/more-ideas-for-listening/feed/ 7 New additions to the catalog http://librivox.org/2009/04/24/new-additions-to-the-catalog/ http://librivox.org/2009/04/24/new-additions-to-the-catalog/#comments Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:23:21 +0000 LibriVox Admin Team http://librivox.org/?p=3828 Thanks to the good people at Archive.org, we are now beginning to add the new items that you have been waiting for! :D

A number of new works have already been cataloged thanks to our intrepid world-wide and sleep deprived MC volunteers, and they’ll continue to chip away at the backlog just as fast as they can. Keep an eye on the New Releases feed for new audio as it becomes available.

And, gentle listeners, as always LibriVox needs you to point out any problems that may occur with the new process. Please post any observed weirdness in the Error Reports forum.

]]> http://librivox.org/2009/04/24/new-additions-to-the-catalog/feed/ 4 New staff picks http://librivox.org/2009/04/15/new-staff-picks/ http://librivox.org/2009/04/15/new-staff-picks/#comments Wed, 15 Apr 2009 10:27:02 +0000 LibriVox Admin Team http://librivox.org/?p=3746 A new selection of recordings for you to try!

The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
2009 is the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. This is a vivid and exciting travel memoir as well as a detailed scientific field journal, read by various readers.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Different characters (and readers) in turn take up the narrative of this mystery novel.

The Cosmic Computer by H. Beam Piper
Sci-fi read by Mark Nelson

Märchen 1 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Diese Sammlung umfaßt so berühmte Geschichten wie Rapunzel, Hänsel und Gretel, Rumpelstilzchen.


Rupert of Hentzau by Anthony Hope
The sequel to ‘The Prisoner of Zenda‘ read by Andy Minter.

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers
A Lord Peter Wimsey who-done-it read by Kristin Hughes and Kara Shallenberg.

Heidi by Johanna Spyri
The classic children’s story read by Kara Shallenberg.

Heretics by G. K. Chesterton
One of the best known of Chesterton’s works of Christian apologetics, read by Ray Clare.

The Fairyland of Science by Arabella Buckley
Perhaps a little twee in places, but there is still good science for children in this book, written and read (by various readers) in a very accessible way.

La Comtesse d’Escarbagnas par Molière
Une comédie-ballet, cette pièce de théâtre est lu en francais par plusieurs lecteurs.

]]> http://librivox.org/2009/04/15/new-staff-picks/feed/ 2 Multilingual Poetry Collection Vol. 010 http://librivox.org/2008/09/14/multilingual-poetry-collection-vol-010/ http://librivox.org/2008/09/14/multilingual-poetry-collection-vol-010/#comments Sun, 14 Sep 2008 13:06:42 +0000 LibriVox Admin Team http://librivox.org/2008/09/14/multilingual-poetry-collection-vol-010/ Multilingual Poetry Collection 010

by Various

In LibriVox’s Multilingual Poetry Collection, LibriVox volunteers read their favourite public-domain poems in languages other than English (or in specific regional accents in English). (Summary by David Barnes).

mp3 and ogg files