Reports Rainer:

I just have to brag a little bit about “The Brothers Karamazov”, please forgive me…

I finished the project and by cataloging it, I managed to reach the two years of audio milestone.
http://librivox.org/the-brothers-karamazov-by-fyodor-dostoyevsky/

It has a length of 40 hours. I know, some Dickens novels are just as long and were read as a solo, but I had to deal with 96 sections and perceived at least 300 volunteers: for more than a year I was able to constantly have one section not claimed. Every time a section was claimed, I orphaned another one due to the two month rule. It was started as a solo project, abandoned, taken up by a coordinator, who abandoned it, too. Moreover, I had three prooflisteners and two editors who volunteered for this project. Tricia was the last editor/prooflistener/reader. Thank you!

I’m really glad that this book is finally finished. It was started nearly four years ago, in April 2006 and it was one of my three horsemen of the Apocalypse of Russian novels. The other two are “Crime and Punishment” and “War and Peace”. “Crime and Punishment” was cataloged a while age and now only “War and Peace” is left.

The latter one is a 17-headed hydra (17 volumes) and I can concentrate now on finishing this one. At the moment I deal with its 14th and 15th head…

Rainer

Whichever it is, today is National Cheese Lovers’ Day in the US. It is not entirely clear who it was that decided this would be the case, and it is not the only unofficial cheese-related holiday in the US calendar.

However, the Internet clearly thinks it is National Cheese Lovers’ Day and even the LA Times agrees. So it must be.

In honour of the occasion, LibriVox is proud to release its long-awaited recording of Bob Brown’s classic The Complete Book of Cheese.

Click here to download the files

Download audio file (librivox_community_podcast_110.mp3)

Duration: 20:21

Learning a New Language with LibriVox!

Happy New Year (again!)

Gregg Margaritte talks about his year at LibriVox (his LibriVersary is this Saturday.)

Nicholas Bridgewater reads the post which started off the Language Learning Resources mini-project at LibriVox. Also, some samples of his language recordings — and his wife, Grace Odeny Bridgewater, introduces herself.

Thoughts on using LibriVox for learning Portuguese from Leni (read by Cori.)

Denny Sayers reads from the Prologue of the soon-to-be-completed project: English Synonyms and Antonyms.

Availle reads from an as-yet unrecorded German-English textbook.

Music by Brahms, played by the US Army Band, from the lovely Public Domain Classical Music venture – musopen.com.

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

Download audio file (librivox_community_podcast_109.mp3)

Duration: 56:01

New Year, new exoplanets and a new podcaster duo!
 
Happy New Year, everyone! We have on our show:
 

What’s so special about 2009?
 
An interview with Lucy_k_p
 
Messages from Nadine, Bart, Availle, Joy, Christian, Barry, Elli (read by Neeru), Ryan, Dii and Neeru about their 2009 debuts
 
A Special Something for the New Year
 

What’s to look forward to in 2010?
 
Ruth talks about authors who have just stepped into the public domain in Europe and other parts of the world
 
Sean the ductapeguy and his father read a poem
 
Some expected milestones 
 
What shall we add to the catalog in 2010? – Andy and Ryan

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

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?

Download audio file (librivox_community_podcast_108.mp3)

Duration: 30:53

Seasons greetings! The main voices you’ll hear, in order of appearance:

Me!
Elli and Neeru (and many blooping stars!)
Lucy Perry’s post read by David Lawrence
Sean McGaughey (excerpted from a For the Sake of the Song podcast)
Nicholas Bridgewater (from forthcoming project Aventuroj de Alicio en Mirlando de L. Carroll)
Sarah Jennings (on Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management)
Great Plains (with an excerpt from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol read by Glen Halstrom)
Ruth Golding

See also our Carol Collection and Video Introduction to LibriVox.

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 and 2008.

Archived shownotes for the Librivox 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
Community Podcasts have been downloaded 17,424 times so far this year!

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:

• the annual Christmas Short Works Collections from 2006 – 2009, which have not only English contributions, but also stories and poems in many languages.
• Adventskalender 2009 in German
• Christmas Poetry and Hymn Collection

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/christmas-carol-collection-2009/

[Link].

More to come, we hope. Thanks Daniel.

The recorders of chapter one have been called: fools, jerks, jocks, idiots, criminals and worse; the recording has been called: an insult to Joyce, an insult to listeners, an insult to literature, a travesty, a hoax, a bad joke, and embarrassing, among other things. One listener suggested that his dog would do a better job of making the recording.

Of course I tell every complainant that we’ll put up alternate versions along with the originals if they wish to record it for us, as is standard LibriVox policy; so far no one has produced another recording for us.

Still I thought it worthwhile to give a bit of context to our version of Ulysses.

LibriVox started in late August 2005, really got rolling in September 2005; by the end of October 05, we’d completed eight (yes, 8) books: Conrad’s Secret Agent; Frank L Baum’s Road to Oz; Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground; Washington Irving’s Old Christmas, Henry James’ International Episode (both requests from the Internet Archive), Call of the Wild, Frankenstein, and PG Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City. All reasonable, approachable, easy books. And relatively short.

And so when I proposed Ulysses as a book we should tackle, in early November 2005, just two months and change after LibriVox came into being … there was something of a gasp in our little (at the time) community of free-public-domain-audiobook makers … Ulysses? … Joyce’s Ulysses? Yikes. We were only figuring out how to manage more than a handful of projects at the time. We were just a bunch of strangers who thought it would be fun to make free audiobooks, and we were cobbling together a way to get it done by anyone in the world who wanted to help out. But: Ulysses?

In the spirit of taking on impossible tasks (our objective, after all, is to record every public domain text in the universe and give the audiobooks away for free), we jumped in. Ulysses project start date: November 8, 2005; finish date: June 16, 2007 (19 months later).

Because Ulysses seemed like such a crazy project, we added some special rules to go along with the recording of this, probably the most intimidating book in the English language:

1.editing allowed but not required … you can record it as is. bad sound, backround noise, whatever, will add to the experience, I *think* JJ would approve
2. extra points for recording in a pub or public place (on the street is good)
3. bonus points if you record in dublin
4. you are encouraged to get others to help you record your chapter
5. more extra points for getting several people to record with you in a pub.
6. square those points if those other people are strangers
7. Target completion date: midnight, June 14 (2006) [actual completion: June 16, 2007]

[You can see the forum discussions from the project thread when it was launched].

And with that set of special guidelines, off we went, with little regard for anything except trying to make a free audio version of Ulysses, or at least something like that. This project was and is truly different than anything else LibriVox did – because we were so liberal in approach to the text. But to me, anyway, it paralleled the madness of LibriVox itself. We were driven not by thoughts of who might listen, but rather by the wonderful craziness of the idea of getting a bunch of amateurs to try to record the darned thing; and that crazy idea was translated, I can report, into wonderful craziness on the evening of the recording of Chapter One of Ulysses, at my house. An indescribable night of art and performance and bacchanalia, at the end of which there was an audio document, an mp3. It would take a year-and-a-half before the rest of the chapters would be finished, and published. Would anyone listen? Who knew? Who cared? [I can't remember what the total downloads we'd had in those first couple of months of LibriVox, but it couldn't have been more than a few hundred, possibly a few thousand].

As for the other chapters of our Ulysses, there is so much variety in that audiobook: from the chaotic and impromptu, to the straight, to the ambitiously artistic (see: Chapter 15f [mp3]) and the abstract (see: Chapter 18 [mp3]).

The point with LibriVox in the early days (and, I would argue, still) was just to make these recordings, and to keep making them, to encourage more people to make, and give away, recordings of books they cared about, until we’d finished recording all the books there were to record. We just hoped that someone somewhere might find some use for some of these audiobooks at some point. Our focus though has always been on the readers, the volunteers, the people making recordings – they are our true constituents; that the rest of the world gets a library of free audiobooks has always seemed to me to be a wonderful fringe benefit of our true work, which is helping people make and give away recordings of texts they love.

And of course, we’ve always had the following policy: if you do not like any of our recordings, please record an alternate version for us and we’ll post it along with the first.

Still, knowing that Ulysses is a strange beast, our catalog page states the following:

NOTE: Because of the nature of this project, there was a bending of usual LibriVox procedures: pub-like background noise was encouraged, as well as creative group readings; and no editing was required, so in places there may be some accidental variation from the original text. Listener be warned!

So, if you find yourself listening to our recording of Ulysses & agreeing with our previous correspondents who think we are insulting poor James Joyce’s memory by allowing such an audiobook to exist, here are some practical responses:

1. We encourage multiple recordings of the same text. Your version of any chapter of Ulysses would be welcomed heartily (so far we’ve had no takers for adding other versions of the existing Ulysses chapters … which is another good reason to have such an idiosyncratic first chapter – perhaps it is so hard to listen to that someone finally will get fed up and gives us another version … two-and-a-half years later, we’re still waiting).
2. There is, as of today, a catalog of 2879 non-Ulysses audiobooks for you to choose from – I can recommend a few if you like
3. There is no other recording like Ulysses in the LibriVox catalog – everything else is recorded to the best of our ability to conform to the text (Oh, actually somewhere in there is a New Year’s recording of Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXVIII [mp3] [text] that is not far off the Ulysses aesthetic).

So, perhaps you won’t like our recording of Ulysses. Or, perhaps you might pour yourself one of your favourite beverages, and sit down to listen to, and enjoy a chaotic performance of Joyce’s chaotic work.

But the thing we wish, more than anything else, is that you would make a recording for us: of Ulysses, or any other public domain text that you love dearly, and think ought to be available in audio format to the whole world, for free.