Some LibriVox stats for everyone:

• Days since LibriVox started: 71
• Number of volunteers on the forum: 65
• Number of volunteers who have completed at least one chapter: 27
• Number of chapters recorded (roughly): 130
• Average number of chapters produced per day: 1.83
• Number of books completed: 4 (one is not yet released)
• Number of completed books expected by the end of this week: 8
  
• Number of solo projects done or underway: 7
• Number of completed books expected by Dec. 31, 2005: 24
• Number of books targeted for completion by Dec. 31, 2005: 20
• Number of books targeted for completion by Dec. 31, 2006: 100

As we wait giddy with anticipation for the podcast of the last two chapters of The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad, our volunteers have been busy at their microphones, finishing three books:

• Call of the Wild, by Jack London
  (thanks to Gord, Kristen, Jean, and Miette)
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie
  (a solo project by Alex)
• The Road to Oz, by L. Frank Baum
  (another solo, from Kara)

We’ll be podcasting these once we get through Secret Agent.

Well done to all of you… more books to come in soon, check our catalog to see what we’ve done and what we’re doing.

Please note:
We always need more volunteers; check our forums and join us.

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.

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!

A few changes in the life of LibriVox, and some interesting developments.

First, thanks to Kristen for doing some organizational & design work on the site. We’ll be looking at moving to a more robust content management system soon, to make the book choice/chapter reservation process more efficient. A “call for volunteers” will be going out (soonish) for any techies out there interested in helping with that process. Please comment below if you would like to help.

Second, in the “nothing new under the sun” department, here’s a site from France, operating since January 2005, doing much the same thing as LibriVox: incipit blog … great titles too!

And: we’ve been in touch with Project Gutenberg (our source for public domain e-texts) regarding LibriVox and got an enthusiastic response from CEO Dr. Gregory Newby. We’ll be trying to figure out how to make that connection work, over the next few months. We’ll be doing the same with the Internet Archive , to try to streamline our audio file hosting process.

Finally, if you wish to record for LibriVox, Boyhood (Tolstoy) and Frankenstein (Shelley), still have chaps up for grabs. Reserve your chapters here.

In the mean time, get to your microphones, or just sit back and listen …

While we wait for fling93 to produce chapter 3 of the Secret Agent, I thought it would be worthwhile to record a more detailed background on the project (with “umms” edited out!).

Also, stay tuned for an interview about LibriVox with Paula B of the Writing Show.

And here’s the latest librivox podcast, a non-chapter explanation of the project: librivox-background-aug 19 2005.

so we’ve made it to playlistmag.org! and got hits galore on the site. Thanks for the nice write-up, mat.

Chapter 3 is on its way, as is a more detailed audio intro to the project.

In the mean time, I’ve had some problems with the ourmedia.org uploader (won’t work on the PC, won’t work on the mac) and that means I can’t get files bigger than 10MB on the ourmedia site. I’ll be working on a solution.

And someone has offered to do an audio commentary on The Secret Agent! So that’ll probably come after all 13 chapters have been podcasted.

If you’re reading this, please give us a plug on your blog, we’re a totally volunteer project just trying to see if we can make this idea work, so consider volunteering to read a chapter; and sign up to our feed, download and listen. Think of it as a collective audio book club, chapter by chapter.

Here is a brief intro librivox podcast.

LibriVox is a hope, an experiment, and a question: can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting? Here’s how it works (for now):

1. A book will be selected by LibriVox from the gutenberg project’s database of public domain books
2. (We hope that) a few volunteers will step up to read and record to mp3 one or more chapters from the chosen book, so that we’ll finish with a complete audio book (or audiobook).
3. If you have your own podcast, you could do a special LibriVox edition of your show, and let me know about it; then I’ll grab the audio and put it up on Ourmedia.org, which stores files on the internet archive
4. If you don’t have a podcast, let me know and we’ll find a way to get the chapters uploaded to the LibriVox Ourmedia.org site
5. Each new chapter will be linked from LibriVox, and podcast through feedburner.
6. Once all chapters from a given book are finished, a new book will be chosen and the process will begin again!

So, practically:

1. if you would like to record and post a chapter or a few of a book, please contact LibriVox at: librivox[at]yahoo[dot]ca
2. if you would like to subscribe to the podcast, please:
   a) goto our feedburner feed
   b) and plug the feed … http://feeds.feedburner.com/Librivox … into your podcast receiver (for instance, ipodder)

Please note that the quality of the recordings will vary. My first recordings are pretty poor. (Not everyone can sound as professional as Jan from UAA Audio Books!) But, inspired by wikipedia, we will encourage disgruntled listeners to make better recordings (of poor quality chapters), and make them available to the project. The first objective will to be to put out some recordings and see where this goes.

For some suggestions and notes on how to make audio recording of books, see here.
For help listening, and an explanation of podcastng, see here (coming soon).

This project is inspired by AKMA’s audio volunteer project to bring Lawrence Lessig’s book, Free Culture, to your ears; and Urban Art Adventures’ Audio Book project. In addition to that, the following inspirations should be noted:

• the podchef (and podcasting in general)
• wikipedia
• rms & the Free Software movement
• gutenberg project
• creative commons
• ourmedia
• internet archive
• the “books on tape” I used to listen to as a kid on long drives with some family friends
• the librarians and public libraries around the world
• and all those crusaders for free and equal access to the cultural and communication foundations of our world, who have worked, and continue to work tirelessly to make possible all the infrastructure that lets this project happen

Comments are welcome below, or at: librivox[at)yahoo[dot]ca

A note about me:
I’m a Montreal-based writer interested in the “free movement” in it’s many guises. More about me can be found at my weblog, dose.