Well, here’s some more exciting stuff. We’ve been in contact with the Internet Archive to let them know about LibriVox. Brewster Kahle (listen to his inspiring talk, Universal Access to All Human Knowledge), the founder of the Archive likes LibriVox, has invited us to participate in an event with them.

Along with Yahoo and a number of universities, Archive.org is launching the Open Content Alliance to scan and make available books from the public domain. LibriVox has been asked to make a recording of Henry James’ An International Episode, which if I understand correctly, will be one of the first books in the OCA project.

This will be interesting. Here’s a NYT article about OCA, and a Boing Boing post. And here’s what Brewster Kahle has to say about the initiative:

Is Open Content the next step in the traditions of Open Source and an Open Network? Many people seem to think so (and wouldn’t it be great?). Working with libraries, government institutions, archives, technology companies, web companies- and we all are saying the same thing- it is time to have more great material available on the Internet and to be able to have it be open and free.

Read the rest of his comments.

Exciting times for LibriVox and all you audiolit providers out there!

We were mentioned today on BBC 6, Breakfast Show, Tech Tuesdays with Dave Green … I don’t know if we were on the audio version, but we got a tip on their site:

There’s no denying that books are convenient, but you can also catch up on a few literary classics while doing other things (like driving, or going to the gym) thanks to a new site [librivox] where amateur “podcasters” record chapters of out-of-copyright hits – from Frankenstein to Agatha Christie – in free-to-download MP3 form.

Firstly, I urge the feet draggers on our older official selections (The Secret Agent, Notes from the Underground, Frankenstein, Childhood, Call of the Wild, and Psmith in the City) to get your chapters done. We will be participating in an event with the Internet Archive on October 25, and it would be great to have these finished by then. So please get to those microphones and start recording! If you are worried about quality, have stage fright, or are nervous about how your voice sounds, don’t be! You are volunteering for the good of humanity! If you are having problems recording your chaps, just let us know.

Second, we are throwing caution to the wind and adding a whole slew of new books.

The process will work as follows:

1. A “team leader” will volunteer for each book (book captain? book booster? … have a better name? let us know).
2. The team leader will look at the text, and section the book into reasonable chunks. One or several chaps, about 20 p per section.
3. The team leader will post the book title and the chapter segments in the Readers Wanted section of the forum (see format already there)
4. Volunteers then post to claim chapters, and the Book Leader will make sure everything adds up, and then assign “official” chapters to the volunteers.
5. Team leader will follow-up if readers seem to be having troubles getting their files finished.
6. The team leader will set a reasonable (soft) target for completion of the book, say 1 month for smaller books, 2 months for bigger books. This is flexible, but we don’t want things dragging on forever.
7. When files are done, contact LibriVox and your book leader.
8. As chapters come in, the book leader will update the forum.

For now, uploading will still be done by LibriVox. Any questions? … post here or on the forum!

Here are the next batch of books (all linked to the gutenberg text):

• Captain Cook’s Journal During the First Voyage Round the World – by Captain James Cook
• A Christmas Carol – by Charles Dickens
• Five Children & It – by Edith Nesbit
• Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow – by Jerome K. Jerome
• The Innocents Abroad – by Mark Twain
• A Journey to the Interior of the Earth – by Jules Verne
• Leaves of Grass (poetry) – by Walt Whitman
• Treasure Island – by Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Trial – by Franz Kafka
• An International Episode – by Henry James (Hugh is Team Leader)

Note also, for you Classics scholars out there, The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides is still looking for readers.