More press about audiolit podcasts, and LibriVox: a great article from the Book Standard. LibriVox friends Ron Evry, JD Bartlett, and Miette all get the warm glow of limelight as well. (Check our sidebar, under audiolit projects, for some others who deserve heaps of audiolit praise as well).
I hate to rain on your parade – but there are already a number of organizations providing a slew of books in audioformats. Additionally, there are a good number of text-to-speech programs available in a wide varirty of configurations and prices ranges [including free]. Combining these with AT&T Natural Voices of NeoSpeech and you can have Project Gutenberg on your laptop.
yes there are many other projects, spoken alex & telltale weekly, audiobooksforfree.com probably among the most advanced. but the freeness of these other sites varies, as does the catalogue. LibriVox was started, actually, because I wanted a free audio version of the Secret Agent to download and could not find it anywhere – in my searches, though perhaps it exists.
and the objective here is to “donate” everything to project gutenberg, which has many computer-generated audiobooks (which to me is not at all the same as human read, even if the quality and hunmanness gets better) but few human generated – it would be nice if they had more, and hopefully LibriVox and otherrs will help add a host of audio files to gutenberg’s collection.
re: rain on parade…
First off, because other organizations are doing it doesn’t mean there is isn’t room for more. As far as I can tell there still isn’t a huge repository of completely free audio books read by actual humans, and many classics are hard to find.
As far as text-to-speech is concerned … I have yet to meet anyone who would prefer to listen to a computer interpret the classics over an actual human being. No matter how sophisticated such programs become you can’t expect a computer program to be able to interpret literature.
Until such a time as Project Gutenberg has at least one complete, unabridged human-read audio book for each of its thousands of public domain texts, I think the need for projects such as Librivox will remain.
Bingo and spot-on, Gordon. It’s the human presence that brings value and spirit and warmth to these podcasts, that allows us as listeners the immersive experience of being read to, which, incidentally, is the greatest cited shortcoming of on-screen text-based Gutenberg (“who wants to read on a computer monitor?”). The voice behind a human reading, with emphasis and pauses and stammering and everything else that makes it a human reading, well, this is about the closest use I’ve seen of using technology to emulate an intimate and personal experience (that, of course, of being read to, an experience that, for many, is sadly novel, foreign, or obsolete). In fact, if I were more an evangelist, I would say that this is nothing short of a revival movement for oral storytelling. Hallelujah!
On the other hand, using a computer voice (even that saucy “Princess” voice on Macs) is so icy, impersonal, point-missing, akin to golfball-sized hail on a parade of lights.
… Or perhaps my romanticism is of the hopeless variety, who’s to say. Just one girl’s sleepily verbose and clunky thought.