Lifehacker.com sends a pointer our way, highlighting our audiobook recording advice.

And they added this wonderful illustration of why modulation is important:

Modulate. Never forget Ferris Bueller. “In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the… Anyone? Anyone?… the Great Depression, passed the… Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act?” Monotones are evil. Bring life and vitality to your reading.

Treasure Island

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island is one of the great pirate adventure stories, and is our featured book seeking volunteers this week, comment below here to sign up to read a chapter.

Chapters to be claimed:
*ch 1-2 - Squiddhartha
*ch 3-4 - Gord
*ch 5-6 - Kara
*ch 7-8
*ch 9-10
*ch 11-12
*ch 13-14 - Squiddhartha
*ch 15-16 - Hugh
*ch 17-18
*ch 19-20
*ch 21-22
*ch 23-24
*ch 25-26
*ch 27-28 - Alex Foster
*ch 29-30
*ch 31-32
*ch 33-34

If you are interested in volunteering to read chapters from another book, or suggesting a book to read, take a look at our Forum, where readers are needed for Kafka, Edith Nesbit, Jules Verne, Walt Whitman, and Thucydides, among others.

So we have a whole new batch of books to record, ten of them, and we need your voices.

All books were suggested by volunteers.

Curious about what we’ve chosen? Feel the urge to read out loud? Think that everyone should be listening to great literature on their way to work instead of top 40 hits? Get a kick out of contributing to the good of all humanity?

Well we have just the thing. Check out our Forum in the “readers wanted” section, and post to reserve a chapter of a book you love, or would love to read.

Or comment here and we’ll walk you through it. The world is waiting to hear all this great writing, and you can help.

Firstly, I urge the feet draggers on our older official selections (The Secret Agent, Notes from the Underground, Frankenstein, Childhood, Call of the Wild, and Psmith in the City) to get your chapters done. We will be participating in an event with the Internet Archive on October 25, and it would be great to have these finished by then. So please get to those microphones and start recording! If you are worried about quality, have stage fright, or are nervous about how your voice sounds, don’t be! You are volunteering for the good of humanity! If you are having problems recording your chaps, just let us know.

Second, we are throwing caution to the wind and adding a whole slew of new books.

The process will work as follows:

1. A “team leader” will volunteer for each book (book captain? book booster? … have a better name? let us know).
2. The team leader will look at the text, and section the book into reasonable chunks. One or several chaps, about 20 p per section.
3. The team leader will post the book title and the chapter segments in the Readers Wanted section of the forum (see format already there)
4. Volunteers then post to claim chapters, and the Book Leader will make sure everything adds up, and then assign “official” chapters to the volunteers.
5. Team leader will follow-up if readers seem to be having troubles getting their files finished.
6. The team leader will set a reasonable (soft) target for completion of the book, say 1 month for smaller books, 2 months for bigger books. This is flexible, but we don’t want things dragging on forever.
7. When files are done, contact LibriVox and your book leader.
8. As chapters come in, the book leader will update the forum.

For now, uploading will still be done by LibriVox. Any questions? … post here or on the forum!

Here are the next batch of books (all linked to the gutenberg text):

• Captain Cook’s Journal During the First Voyage Round the World - by Captain James Cook
• A Christmas Carol - by Charles Dickens
• Five Children & It - by Edith Nesbit
• Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow - by Jerome K. Jerome
• The Innocents Abroad - by Mark Twain
• A Journey to the Interior of the Earth - by Jules Verne
• Leaves of Grass (poetry) - by Walt Whitman
• Treasure Island - by Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Trial - by Franz Kafka
• An International Episode - by Henry James (Hugh is Team Leader)

Note also, for you Classics scholars out there, The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides is still looking for readers.

We need a pinch-hitter to read Chapters 9-10 of Frankenstein (Jeff’s schedule got busier than expected). So if anyone would like to record 9-10, please let us know, by posting on the LibriVox forum.

Let’s jump in and demonstrate the advantages of the LibriVox system!

Want to discuss the best way to record your chapters? Wonder about about how to pronounce character names? Are you eager to share a brilliant tip to help us all improve our readings?

Well now you can. We’ve added forums to LibriVox. We hope this will be a useful resource for all LibriVox readers, book curators, admins, and other volunteers.

Click on the forums link in the blue volunteers box to be directed to the new forums at mediatinker.com.

To participate in the forums, please register on the forum page.

Listeners, there’s a place in the forums for you to leave your suggestions, too.

As a LibriVox reader, you can tap into your acting talents and give your characters voices. Depending on your book and the character, you may choose to be subtle or outrageous. No matter which, it makes it easier for the listener to distinguish during dialogue.

How do you create a character’s voice? Tone (nasal, smooth, scratchy, breathy, rumbling), pitch (high, low) and speed combine to make memorable voices.

Experiment, practice, and listen closely to friends and strangers to hear a wide range of voices you can imitate.

We’ve had some technical problems with Chapter 7 of the Secret Agent. After much toiling and voice modulation a wonderful (and London-accented!) Conrad rendition was produced by Lloyd Davis. Unfortunately, the mp3 files seemed to get corrupted with big patches of Audacity silence. Any Audacity experts out there, please lend a hand if you can.

On the home front, we are fully-subscribed now for:

• The Secret Agent
• Psmith in the City
• Notes from the Underground
• Call of the Wild

Tolstoy’s Childhood, for some reason, still needs voices to go with it’s chapters! To hear why we chose Childhood, have a listen to Dale’s excellent rendition of chapters 7-9). To reserve a highly-coveted Childhood chapter, please comment here.

Two other points of note.

1. While we will only podcast sequentially one (or 2?) books at a time, we’ll post chapters as they come in to our LibriVox catalogue of books. So if you want to listen to not-yet-”released” LibriVox recordings, or to link to your recording, check the catalogue and it should be there.

2. We want your suggestions for LibriVox books. Please post your book suggestions below. Also, we would like the salespeople among you to go out and recruit volunteers to record books which you suggest … we’ll award special public domain prizes (yet to be determined) to anyone who can gather volunteers for a complete book. Spread the public domain audio gospel!

Here’s a trick from a friend of mine who narrates books on tape for the blind.

If you stop a recording session without finishing the book, next time you prepare to record, play back the last few minutes of the previous recording and read along.

This helps your voice “settle in” and find the pace and intonation that matched your previous recording, creating a nearly seamless listening experience for the audience.

So things are clicking along at LibriVox, and we hope to make the volunteering easier to keep track of soon. Also, as mentioned, we’ll be opening up the book selection process, and putting it into the capable hands of the volunteers (who have suggested, among others, Joyce’s Ulysses (!) , some Homer, a Dutch collection, Thucydides, The Golden Bough … ambitious!). Also a big benvenuto! to the many readers we seem to be getting from Italy … (How about an Italian version of Dante’s Inferno?)

In the mean time, we will be posting chapters to our catalogue as they come in, but still podcasting sequentially.

UPDATE:
Thus far we are fully-subscribed for: The Secret Agent, Frankenstein, Notes from the Underground, Psmith in the City, and Call of the Wild. And we still need volunteers for Tolstoy’s Childhood. (Please reserve a chapter of Tolstoy by commenting: here).

Now, as we are filling up I thought I would add another book: Jack London’s Call of the Wild. To reserve a chapter, please comment below. (Note I’m going to keep them small & relatively easy until we get a better set-up for volunteering). Make sure you:
a) name the chapters you claim
b) make it clear who you are

Call of the Wild
by Jack London
gutenberg e-text: here.

Chapters to be claimed:
-ch 1-2 - gord
-ch 3-4 - kristen
-ch 5-6 - jeano
-ch 7 - miette

NOTES:

• save files: call_of_the_wild_1-2_london

ID3 tags:

• album: call_of_the_wild
• track: call_of_the_wild_ch_1-2
• artist: london_j

Other notes:

• PLEASE read recording notes before recording.