You can see the ad by clicking here. It was directed by Dennis Liu for the ad agancy BBDO.

You can see the shot of the cover art, created by regular LV sleeve contributor Kate Delaney, a few seconds into the commerical, and if you are really keen-eyed, you can also make out the word “LibriVox”.

http://librivox.org/moby-dick-by-herman-melville/

Download audio file (librivox_community_podcast_114.mp3)

Duration: 1hr 47min

With contributions from hugh, kayray, Algy Pug, Availle, RuthieG, Rowland, ExEmGe, HokusPokus, neerajanagarajan, neckertb, Nicholas19, gloriana, Cori, tis, Gesine, annise, Jonathan Awesome, KathrynD, rf, Great Plains, Starlite, aradlaw, TriciaG, russiandoll, wdcallahan and Claire — along with a host of other LibriVox Voices. Sound effects mostly from pdsounds.org

Join us as we celebrate the fifth anniversary of the creation of LibriVox. Listen as our readers tell us about the parts of LibriVox that they love. And enjoy a lazy afternoon pondering the future of LibriVox.

Running order:
An interview with kayray (4:40)
Algy Pug gives a new reader’s view of LibriVox (14:13)
Some LibriVox statistics collected by Availle (17:22)
RuthieG and the Fifth Anniversary Collections (25:06)
Rowland on LibriVox Addiction (27:40)
ExEmGe on how LibriVox has changed his life (31:57)
LibriVox is Five Years Old, a poem by Lucy_k_p (35:32)
The Languages of LibriVox (37:14)
HokusPokus, neerajanagarajan and neckertb discuss the latest German, Tamil and French works (41:10)
The Language Learning Initiative by Nicolas19 (54:18)
gloriana talks about what’s new in the Dramatic Works Forum (56:47)
Cori reflects on Podcasts (1:04:02)
An interview with hugh (1:05:09)
tis gives us a look behind the scenes at the technical side of LibriVox (1:18:53)
Gesine tell us how to Thank a Reader (1:23:23)
annise and Jonathan Awesome discuss the making of M4B files (1:28:15)
How I create CD Covers by KathrynD (1:32:30)
rf on plain vanilla CD case inserts (1:35:23)
Some advice to new volunteers from Great Plains (1:39:18)
The LibriVox Fundraiser (1:40:31)
Happy Anniversary LibriVox, from all our readers (1:43:05)

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To Subscribe to the Librivox Community Podcast, go to:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/LibrivoxCommunityPodcast

Or hit this itunes link to get you to the subscribe page:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=203970211

Recent past and present LibriVox Community Podcast files can be found at our spot on:
Archive.org

Archived shows for previous years can be found at:
2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.

Archived shownotes for the Community Podcast can be found at:
http://librivox.org/category/librivox-community-podcast/

And the rss feed for those shownotes is:
http://librivox.org/category/librivox-community-podcast/feed

LibriVox is a hope, an experiment, and a question: can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting?

LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain. It works like this: a book is chosen, then *you*, the volunteers, read and record one or more chapters. We liberate the audio files through this webblog/podcast every week (?).

Five years later, it seems as if the answer is: yes.

Our latest catalog statistics are the following:

* Number of completed projects: 3,656
* Number of completed non-English projects: 533
* Total number of languages: 31
* Number of languages with a completed work: 29
* Number of completed solo projects: 1676
* Number of readers: 3889

For the last six months, we’ve averaged 87 books a month, or just under 3 books per day.

Total recorded time: 76119522 seconds, or 2 years, 150 days, 12 hours, 41 minutes, and 10 seconds. Total of 76226 sections.

We’ve achieved all this in large part thanks to wonderful resources of our partners: Project Gutenberg, who still provide the bulk of our texts; Distributed Proofreaders, who help proofread Gutenberg texts; the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who help point us in the right direction on the rare occasions when we have legal questions; and of course the Internet Archive, who host all of our terabytes of audio files (for free).

Thank you also to those who donated in our first-ever fund-raiser, to help keep LibriVox servers (the non-audio ones) paid-for for the foreseeable future.

And finally: thank you to all the volunteers: the proof-listeners, and the readers, and the BCs and MCs and CD-cover makers, the coders and sysadmins, and all of you who help keep LibriVox going.

I’m looking forward to the next five years.

Perhaps you’d like to help us record more public domain books?

Download audio file (librivox_community_podcast_113.mp3)

Duration: 25:04

In Community Podcast 113, Gesine explains the ins and outs of the new ‘Thank a reader’ feature on the LibriVox website. Clicking on the link in the right-hand sidebar, listeners can send their thanks to a designated email address, and an admin posts the messages in a forum thread and also notifies each reader by PM. From its conception in April to the date of the podcast, August 2010, we’ve received more than 250 thank you emails (approx. 90 messages per month).

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

To Subscribe to the Librivox Community Podcast, go to:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/LibrivoxCommunityPodcast

Or hit this itunes link to get you to the subscribe page:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=203970211

Recent past and present LibriVox Community Podcast files can be found at our spot on:
Archive.org

Archived shows for previous years can be found at:
2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.

Archived shownotes for the Community Podcast can be found at:
http://librivox.org/category/librivox-community-podcast/

And the rss feed for those shownotes is:
http://librivox.org/category/librivox-community-podcast/feed

“A good candidate for ‘the most under-appreciated work by Mark Twain’ would be ‘The Treaty With China,’ which he published in the New York Tribune in 1868. This piece, which is an early statement of Twain’s opposition to imperialism and which conveys his vision of how the U.S. ought to behave on the global stage, has not been reprinted since its original publication until now.” (the online, open-access “Journal of Transnational American Studies” published it in the spring, 2010). (Introduction by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Twain scholar and Director of American Studies at Stanford University, used by permission)

(Transcription by Martin Zehr for the Journal of Transnational American Studies, American Cultures and Global Contexts Center, UC Santa Barbara)

Twain’s article, “The Treaty With China” is available for free in audio, read by the fabulous John Greenman, at:

http://librivox.org/the-treaty-with-china-by-mark-twain/

and

http://www.archive.org/details/treaty_china_1005_librivox

Download audio file (librivox_community_podcast_112.mp3)

Duration: 12:49

Thoughts on books, a few words about pictures and a brand new LV feature for listeners!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

To Subscribe to the Librivox Community Podcast, go to:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/LibrivoxCommunityPodcast

Or hit this itunes link to get you to the subscribe page:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=203970211

Recent past and present LibriVox Community Podcast files can be found at our spot on:
Archive.org

Archived shows for previous years can be found at:
2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.

Archived shownotes for the Community Podcast can be found at:
http://librivox.org/category/librivox-community-podcast/

And the rss feed for those shownotes is:
http://librivox.org/category/librivox-community-podcast/feed

Anzac Day is a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand, and is commemorated by both countries on 25 April every year to honour members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) who fought at Gallipoli in Turkey during World War I.

We have a very active contingent of readers from Australasia, but would be delighted to welcome more.

Here are some other recordings with an Australian theme:

Australia Felix by Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946). The story of Richard Mahony, a doctor trained in Edinburgh who comes to Ballarat in the gold rush of the 1850s. Read by tabithat.

Seven Little Australians by Ethel Sybil Turner (1872-1958). This is the story of seven incorrigible children living near Sydney in the 1880’s with their military-man father, and a stepmother who is scarcely older than the oldest child of the family. Read by Ophelia Darcy.

A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53 by Ellen Clacy. A clergyman’s daughter, who at age 20 left Britain to visit Bendigo with her brother, recounts her trip, and aspects of colonial life, transportation, emigration and other gold-fields. Read by Annise and Lucy Burgoyne.

Robert O’Hara Burke by Andrew Jackson. A non-fictional account of Burke and Wills’s 1860 expedition to cross the Australian continent from south to north and back. Read by Chris Chapman and Magdalena.

A Selection of Australian Poetry and Prose recorded by various readers.

Australian Legendary Tales Folk-Lore of the Noongahburrahs As Told To The Piccaninnies by K. Langloh Parker. A Collection of Australian Aboriginal Legendary Folk-Lore Tales, legends of the Narran tribe, known among themselves as Noongahburrahs. Recorded by various readers.

This week, we’re stepping outside the confines of the printed page and devoting our entire show to the phenomenon of audiobooks. First, we speak to Hugh McGuire, the founder of Librivox, a volunteer-run website that provides readers free recordings of books in the public domain. Then we take a close look at Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro, which broke new ground when it was released as an audiobook earlier this year. And finally we speak to the Chair of the Australian Braille Authority, Bruce Maguire, about how the growing popularity of audiobooks and speech technology may pose a threat to Braille literacy.

Hugh McGuire, founder of Librivox.org; Linda Ferguson and Timothy Ferguson, Librivox volunteers – interviewed by Paul Kildea

Nick Cave, The Death of Bunny Munro, Text Publishing – reviewed by Rochelle Fernandez
Bruce Maguire, Australian Braille Authority – interviewed by Ella O’Keefe

Download audio file (2010-04-12T02_00_34-07_00.mp3)

[Link]

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.