Every once in a while someone writes a really nice blog comment about LibriVox. This is one:

In tangential news, we’ve upped production approximately 6000% in the past couple weeks, with a couple neat discoveries.
First of all, http://librivox.org is a free source for public domain recordings of public domain books. Now, I don’t know about y’all, but I likes me some literature, and all the sudden here’s all the Twain, Dickens, Wodehouse, and Thoreau you’ll need to keep you busy for a good while. You got’cher Oscar Wilde, yer Leo Tolstoy, and yer H.G. Wells. Edgar Rice Borroughs brings us the amazing Tarzan books, there’s Dr. Dolittle, Sherlock Holmes, and a hefty lot of Oz books. I’m pretty sure Mr. Armadillo is quite (Plato!) through with hearing me randomly (Tom Swift!) shouting out nice finds throughout the last week or so (Dostoyevsky!).

I love to have an audiobook running while I work. It keeps my mind busy and I love to spend an afternoon tuned into a reading while making neat things. Audiobooks are hard to come by, though. They’re pricey to buy, and it’s hard for me to get them back to the library on time. Plus, our little branch has a pretty dismal selection, and the good ones can be hard to get ahold of. Finding LibriVox is like I’ve suddenly fallen into this amazing treasure trove, I can’t even adequately describe how tickled I am over the whole thing.

I’ve already signed up to volunteer a reading, and I’ve got a really neat little collection of very old children’s and young adult literature that will be fun to share, most are about dogs or horses or general adventure-type stuff, pirates and shipwrecks. If you know anyone with a Scottish accent that would be willing to do a reading, I have copies of Bob, Son of Battle and Greyfriars Bobby that I would give a great deal to hear properly read.

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WHAT IS IT? pdsounds is like LibriVox for audio-other-than-text. Go there to find recordings of babies sneezing, cats purring and fireworks exploding. It’s all dedicated to the public domain, and therefore is available for people to use in all sorts of ways. Sounds from there make regular appearances in my LibriVox Community Podcasts, for example!

TAKE THE PDSOUNDS CHALLENGE!

A database of sounds is only as good as the sounds it contains. It needs more. LibriVoxers, by definition, tend to be audio-aware people, and many have microphones that could be turned away from the reader briefly to catch another noise. Or just upload your yawns, giggles and coughs as you snip them out of recordings!

BRONZE LEVEL: pledge to contribute one recording during May to pdsounds. Most files there are short (5-30 seconds) and are simple sounds. Every LibriVoxer with a microphone could do this. There is no sound too mundane!

SILVER LEVEL: pledge to contribute one recording a week. Come ON, the moment a yappy dog or low-flying plane interrupts your chapter, that’s your week’s contribution recorded!

GOLD LEVEL: aiming to upload a sound a day!

More info on the challenge, at the LV forum.

More info on PDsounds at PDsounds.

Free Listens is a blog dedicated to reviewing free audiobooks (including some LibriVox books), with new posts weekly. We particularly like the sensible/honest review policies:

* Solo recordings – I tend to review recordings made by one person, rather than the chapter-per-person organization of the Librivox group recordings. I do this for two reasons: 1) I like solo recordings better and 2) it’s easier to review. Listing the qualities of 14 different readers is difficult enough as it is without the possibility that I’ll have to own up that one of the 14 is sub-par.

* No bad reviews – If I’m reading a book and decide I don’t like it, I’ll put it aside; no hard feelings. I’ve come back to books from time to time and discovered that they’re actually good books, but I just wasn’t in the right mental state to enjoy it. The same goes with readers. I won’t continue listening if I dislike the reader, but neither will I publish my opinion that the reader is awful. There’s too much of good stuff out there to spend time dwelling on the negative

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Jon Udell recently gave a talk called Hacking the Noosphere. For those interested in the intersection of technology and society, there’s lots of good stuff in there, and if you scroll down, an interesting take on LirbiVox:

Another example, one that happens to be Montreal-based, is LibriVox, the collaborative project to make audio recordings of public domain books. For quite a while the whole project ran on nothing fancier than an online bulletin board. A lot of us here, me included, would have been tempted to write a soup-to-nuts database-backed application to support that project, because that’s what we’re good at, and that’s what we like to do.

But when I saw how the project really works, I realized that would have been a mistake. Like Wikipedia, LibriVox is actually powered by a set of agreements and protocols and traditions. You can imagine encoding those in software, and the project’s founder — Hugh McGuire — might have wanted to, if he’d had access to the right kind of software talent. But he didn’t, which was almost certainly a good thing. Because the agreements and protocols and traditions weren’t known ahead of time, they had to emerge from the collective. As it turned out, a bulletin board — with its weak structure and loose coupling — was exactly the right way to nurture that emergence.

Over time, those loose structures have begun to coalesce. There’s a database behind LibriVox now, but the project still doesn’t feel like a database application, it’s more like a bulletin board that’s been enhanced with some database features. The real innovation continues to be in the agreements and protocols and traditions that attract, reward, and sustain contributors. LibriVox is a success not because of any particular bit of technical hackery, but because of Hugh McGuire’s inspired social hackery.

Which requires a couple of notes, LibriVox is not really Montreal-based … it lives independently on the web, and its only Montrealness is me, and the odd chapter & volunteer efforts from other Montrealers. Also, while I may have instigated some inspired social hackery, there sure were and are a lot of people equally inspired.