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LibriVox: Free Public Domain Audiobooks
RR 2014/002
Founded by Hugh McGuire
2005-
URL: http://librivox.org/
Last visited July 2013
Gratis
Keywords Audio media, Books, Electronic media, Reading
Review DOI 10.1108/RR-08-2013-0197
As a lifelong reader - and almost exclusively for the past decade - of audio books, and at risk of sounding more colloquial than professional, I love this resource. (Note: I have spent years defending audio book listening as an act of reading and I have been challenged by naysayers claiming that I ought to use the term reading only when I have the written word in front of me. In disclaim, I refer throughout this review to the auditory perception of books from sound recordings as reading.)
Founded in 2005 by writer Hugh McGuire, LibriVox was fuelled by a 2010 crowd-funded campaign. LibriVox is a catalogue of full-text audio books recorded by volunteers and available in digital formats of printed materials in the public domain. To date, there are 6,061 titles available in 48 different languages, from six in Afrikaans to 12 in Yiddish. Each book's catalogue record provides a title and author (with the author linked to search results of other works by this author), abstract, and links to available Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive files. All this information before readers see the MP3 and OGG Vorbis downloadable files listed chapter by chapter. New audio books are added regularly and updates are shown in the related genre-level pages as works in progress, which you can read as each chapter is made available.
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