talking history & librivox

Talking History is a radio show with a great mandate:

Our weekly broadcast/internet radio program, Talking History, begun in 1996, focuses on all aspects of history: how we recall it, how we preserve it, how we interpret it, how we transform it into myth, and how we pass it on—as teachers, researchers, archivists, museum curators, and documentarians. The radio show is aimed at a non-professional audience, and is dedicated to bridging the gap between the history profession and a history-hungry public unaccustomed to the hair-splitting that many scholars are all-too-ready to engage in.

They’ve started linking to LibriVox audio for various shows (Not sure if they are broadcasting our audio too? Hope so), including some Thoreau (mp3), and Nietzsche (mp3) (read by yours truly).

When people have asked me “who will listen to LibriVox books,” I’ve always been a little uncomfortable about my response. I see our job as building a complete library of all public domain books in audio. Who listens, how, why and in what context is something for the future to determine. Will it be knitters? Commuters? The vision impaired? Cramming students? Ipod junkies? Zune fanatics? Will musicians use our audio? All of the above of course, and more.

Projects like Talking History demonstrate the value of having a public doman library like LibriVox. Who knows how our audio will be used in the next few weeks, next few months, next decades. The audio library is there for the world, and I am confident the world is a better place for its existence. That’s enough, and I don’t lose much sleep over figuring out our market.