A group called the institute for the future of the book wrote, what is, I think, the most exciting bit of prose I’ve seen about LibriVox yet. Here is the paragraph that I read three times:
As a regular audiobook listener, I was struck by the fact that while most literary audiobooks are read by authors who tend to work hard at conveying a sense of character, the Librivox selections seemed to convey, more than anything, the reader’s passion for the text itself; ie, for the written word. Here at the Institute we’ve been spending a fair amount of time trying to figure out when a book loses it’s book-ness, and I’d argue that while some audiobooks blur the boundary between book and performance, the Librivox books remind us that a book reduced to a stream of digitally produced sound can still be very much a book.
amen.
(Now on a side note, after the recent explosion of interest in LibriVox my eyeballs are about to fall out of their sockets from all the forum posting etc I’ve been doing, so I’m going to try to take the rest of the day off from LibriVox … see you all tomorrow.)