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?

In this, the 100th year of Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens) death, we’re fortunate that a newspaper article by Twain about US/China relations, written in 1868, has suddenly become available. LibriVox volunteer John Greenman has recorded the article, and been given permission to use the following introduction from Twain Scholar, Shelley Fisher Fishkin.

“A good candidate for ‘the most under-appreciated work by Mark Twain’ would be ‘The Treaty With China,’ which he published in the New York Tribune in 1868. This piece, which is an early statement of Twain’s opposition to imperialism and which conveys his vision of how the U.S. ought to behave on the global stage, has not been reprinted since its original publication until now.” (the online, open-access “Journal of Transnational American Studies” published it in the spring, 2010). (Introduction by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Twain scholar and Director of American Studies at Stanford University, used by permission)

(Transcription by Martin Zehr for the Journal of Transnational American Studies, American Cultures and Global Contexts Center, UC Santa Barbara)

Twain’s article, “The Treaty With China” is available for free in audio, read by the fabulous John Greenman, at:

http://librivox.org/the-treaty-with-china-by-mark-twain/

and

http://www.archive.org/details/treaty_china_1005_librivox