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.

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!

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!

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.

We are fully subscribed for Notes from the Underground and Psmith in the City, so I have added 2 more books. (If you wish to record some other book in its entirety yourself, just let me know). If you wish to volunteer to read chapters of the two chosen books, please comment below, and:

a) name the book you wish to read
b) name the chapters you claim
c) make it clear who you are

The new books are:

Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus
by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

gutenberg e-text: here.

UPDATE: all chapters claimed
-Letters - eric c.
-ch 1-2 - carl
-ch 3-4 - ian (UPDATE)
-ch 5-6 - paula
-ch 7-8 - alex
-ch 9-10 - jeff
-ch 11-13 - karen
-ch 14-15 - kristen
-ch 16-18 - gord
-ch 19-20 - mjd-s
-ch 21-22 - eric s.
-ch 23-24 - hugh

NOTES:

• save files: frankenstein_1-2_shelley

ID3 tags:

• album: frankenstein
• track: frankenstein_ch_1-3
• artist: shelley_mw

Other notes:

• PLEASE read recording notes before recording.

UPDATE

Childhood (note: *not* Boyhood!!)
by Leo Tolstoy

gutenberg e-text: here.

Chapters to be claimed:
-ch 1-3 - hugh
-ch 4-6 - ewa
-ch 7-9 - spunwithtears
-ch 10-12 - gautam p.
-ch 13-15 - damien h
-ch 16-18 - squiddhartha
-ch 19-21
-ch 22-24
-ch 25-27 - scoot

NOTES:

• save files: childhood_1-3_tolstoy

ID3 tags:

• album: childhood
• track: childhood_ch_1-3
• artist: tolstoy_l

Other notes:

• PLEASE read recording notes before recording.

The next choices for LibriVox are:

1. Notes from the Underground, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Find the gutenberg e-text here.

and,

2. Psmith in the City, by P.G. Wodehouse.
Find the gutenberg e-text here.

The objective is to have the chapters recorded ahead of time, and then podcast one at a time in sequence, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays (I hope). I hope, soon also, to get some technical help to make this a more reasonable process.

UPDATE
Official LibriVox Chapter Assignments have been made. I’ll be offering a few other options soon too for other volunteers. This project may soon baloon out of control!

Psmith in the City

by P.G. Wodehouse

ch 1-3: kristen
ch 4-6: podchef
ch 7-9: kara
ch 10-12: tis
ch 13-15: aaron
ch 16-18: luke
ch 19-21: eileen
ch 22-27: bruce
ch 28-30: miette

NOTES:

• save files: psmithinthecity_1-3_wodehouse

ID3 tags:

• album: psmith_in_the_city
• track: ch_1-3
• artist: wodehouse_pg

Other notes:

• the P is silent, and it’s pronounced “woodhouse.”
• PLEASE read recording notes before recording.

Notes from the Underground

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Part One
ch 1-3: greg
ch 4-6: randy
ch 7-9: aaron
ch 10-11: jeff
Part Two
ch 1-3 + poem: podchef
ch 4-7: gordon
ch 8-10: amelia

NOTES:

• save files: notes_p1_1-3_dostoyevsky

ID3 tags:

• album: notes_from_the_underground
• track: p1_ch_1-3
• artist: dostoyevsky_f

Other notes:

• PLEASE read recording notes before recording.