April, 2011

Lovely May

Posted on April 30, 2011 by | Posted in about LibriVox, Blog, Monthly Picks, News | Comments: Comments Off on Lovely May

May has arrived, and this time we present 10 gems on and about love from the depths of our catalog.

Let’s start at the beginning with First Love, of which most of us have fond memories. In Ivan Turgenev’s novella, Vladimir Petrovich recounts his turbulent first romance…

If you don’t want troubles to happen in your relationship, you should take advice from Theodore Arnold Haultain. His Hints for Lovers cover all aspects of romance: from courtship to the first kiss until marriage and children.

On mother’s day (in most countries the 2nd Sunday in May) children take great pains to please their mothers. To avoid having this end in disaster, we recommend When Mother Lets us Cook by Constance Johnson – for children of all ages…

Good food and love sickness are often blamed for gaining weight – and young widow Molly has lots of the latter. While she’s trying to melt away her pounds, 4 suitors are trying to melt her heart. Who is going to succeed in The Melting of Molly, a novel by Maria Thompson Daviess?

Raina Petkoff faces a similar problem in George Bernard Shaw’s drama Arms and the Man. There is her fiance, just returned from the war, but a refugee whom she granted shelter the winter before also stakes his claims. The choice is hers – who will it be?

It’s always a choice whether to love or to leave. Sometimes the choice is made for the good of the other. How such a decision may lead to great pain for the other person after all is something that the protagonist of Camille, Alexandre Dumas (fils) famous novel, has to find out.

George Bellow hopes that the girl who just dumped him will see the errors of her ways eventually. Until then, he takes a walking tour through the country side, where he unexpectedly finds a friend and true love. Curious? Read The Money Moon by Jeffery Farnol.

Money was the driving force behind Charlotte Turner Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems. After all, by writing them she could earn enough money to get her out of jail…

Like a jail can a relationship feel when the love is gone. A woman, tightly bound in another commitment, finds some freedom while stargazing with a young astronomer. Find out about the fate of the Two on a Tower in Thomas Hardy’s novel.

Unfortunately those two would not have been able to verify Einstein’s theory of relativity. This was done when the sun was shining, or rather, during its eclipse on May 29, 1919. Read Easy Lessons in Einstein by Edwin E. Slosson to find out all about relativity.

Enjoy – and give love a chance!

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LibriVox API & OPDS

Posted on April 28, 2011 by | Posted in about LibriVox, News | Comments: Comments Off on LibriVox API & OPDS

You may not know that LibriVox has a catalog API: that is, a way for other developers to access our whole catalog to build apps & other services on top of our audiobooks. You can find info about it here:
http://wiki.librivox.org/index.php/LibriVoxAPI

This has resulted in numerous audiobook apps for the iPhone, Android, as well as a few web services built on top of the LibriVox catalog – which is wonderful, because it gives more people access.

Now there is a “new” catalog spec being developed for ebooks, called OPDS, the Open Publishing Distribution System … which is designed to standardize how publishers let people know about their ebook collections, see:
http://opds-spec.org/

The tireless Chris Goringe has been working on implementing what will be, I think, the first audiobook catalog to the OPDS spec… Which means that we’ll standardize how other developers access out catalog.

Among other things, that should mean that our catalog can be put into places like the Open Library.

It’s kinda geeky, but kinda fun. More news to come …

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