Open Access News

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Friday, December 16, 2005

Free online audio books

Cyrus Farivar, The Web Will Read You a Story, Wired News, December 16, 2005. Excerpt:
This summer, Hugh McGuire was searching for free audio books online from his home in Montreal. He didn't find very much. So McGuire launched LibriVox by recruiting amateur readers to create audio files of works of literature. The project now includes almost two dozen complete works, including Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, Jack London's The Call of the Wild and other classic novels and poems....Like Project Gutenberg, which inspired McGuire to launch the project, LibriVox employs volunteers from around the globe to participate in recording works. Each book is divided up into chapters, and each person records one chapter, which usually ends up being about 20 or 30 minutes of audio. The files are hosted on Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive and are available in MP3 and OGG formats.

(PS: There's another connection to the Internet Archive. LibriVox is working with the Open Content Alliance to produce OA audio editions of the OCA's OA text editions.)