A wonderful new development: LibriVox recordings are starting to be added to Project Gutenberg’s catalog pages. It’s just getting started, and kinks are getting worked out of the process, but here is the official first gutenberg catalog page, with LibriVox audio, provided in many different fomats, including speex!

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum

Wonderful.

This was something we had talked about many months ago with Gutenberg, but it’s taken a while to happen, and was a real surprise when we were told, “it has been done.”

Thanks to Gutenberg for all the work they have done that allows us to do what they do; thanks to Greg Newby for supporting LibriVox; and thanks to Josh Hutchinson for doing the back-end work.

LibriVox is not a political organization. We are based on some basic fndamental principles (see here), but other than that we steer clear of politics. We don’t want politics to distract from our simple objective: to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio on the internet.

However, Net Neutrality is a political issue with huge implications for everything LibriVox does. The bare bones idea of Net Neutrality is that ISPs cannot give preference to sites that pay them money, and block those that don’t. That means that under current rules of the internet, LibriVox and Disney are given the same rights and privildeges.

There is a movement afoot to change that, so that big companies could pay for preferential treatment on the network, to the detriment of stes like LibriVox. This might make, for instance, trying to get to the LibriVox site, or download our files harder and slower. In an extreme case, LibriVox might get blocked completely in favour of corporate “competition.”

Because Net Neutrality is of fundamental importance to LibriVox, we have joined the Save the Internet Coalition and we urge all LibriVox listeners and volunteers to inform themselves on the issue and act as they see fit.

A special happy birthday to Betsie, aka Thistlechick, a tireless LibriVox cataloger, moderator, and meta coordinator!