On August 10, 2005 I put up a website, called it LibriVox, and posted the following:
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?