Verb.org is an exciting new literary journal: it’s audio! Writers read their own work. There’s music, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. Wonderful. It’s a CD subscription, but they also have a weekly podcast with excerpts.
It’s funny, LibriVox gets the occasional comment: Why listen to books? You should read them.
But the history of story-telling is deeply-rooted in voice. Writing is a new invention (only a few thousand years old). Certainly writing for the masses is new. LibriVox, and the plethora of audiolit podcasts – Verb.org among them – are part of a deeper, older tradition, and not some new-fangled desecration of the written word made possible by the iPod. By reading aloud we bring these works to life, we take the written word and free it from the page. Hence, “Acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.” We’ve taken some deserved hits about that tagline – it is, perhaps, a tad pretentious, swanky even, but we feel it’s what we’re doing, freeing books into the airwaves.
And we’re not saying: don’t read! Of course not. We’re saying read, listen, read aloud for us, so others can listen.
Just to add to that sentiment…I think of audiobooks and audiolit podcasts not as an alternative to reading, but as a way to reclaim time for reading that you would waste otherwise. Driving, riding the train, jogging–all chances to take in a Dickens classic instead of trying to find something interesting on the radio. Librivox is a great, ambitious project, deserving of a pretentious tagline.
Hm…Daren…careful about that. Fragmentation of mindfulness creates stress and makes you loose time subjectivly, not gain time. If i´d listen to Dickens i´d better only do listen to Dickens. If I´d go jogging, i´d only go jogging. Lets you experience everything more deeply, creates happiness and the sense to HAVE time in retrospect. It´s a comon misperception that you GAIN time by doing things simulaniously…i know its a sign of our times. It leads to a lot of discontent. Slowness would deserve some more attention these days. Anyways, off topic. YAY verb.org.
(nope, i am not a buddhist)
and look at all the readers librivox has picked up volunteering to READ (and re-READ) while recording…. exercising both eye and ear!