Aug 28
2006

Public Domain Books, Ready for Your iPod

Posted by rhughes in Untagged 

avatar

Thought that this was pretty neat: 

Kara Shallenberg and her 10-year-old son, Henry, exhausted the audiobook collection at their library in Oceanside, Calif., five years ago. With Henry’s appetite for listening still strong, Ms. Shallenberg began to record herself reading his favorite books. Eventually she upgraded from a using a tape deck to burning CD’s on her laptop computer. Last fall she took her hobby to a wider audience.

Kara Shallenberg and her son, Henry, who have joined the effort to record and distribute their book readings for LibriVox.

 

Ms. Shallenberg’s recordings of “The Secret Garden,” “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” and other works are now available, free, to anyone with an Internet connection and basic audio software. She is part of a core group of volunteers who give their voices and spare time to LibriVox, a project that produces audiobooks of works in the public domain.

“Everything I read to Henry was copyrighted,” Ms. Shallenberg said, adding that she was frustrated she couldn’t share those works. “The idea of creating audiobooks that other people could enjoy was exciting.”

LibriVox is the largest of several emerging collectives that offer free or inexpensive audiobooks of works whose copyrights have expired, from Plato to “The Wind in the Willows.” (In the United States, this generally means anything published or registered for copyright before 1923.) The results range from solo readings done by amateurs in makeshift home studios to high-quality recordings read by actors or professional voice talent.

Source: Jacqueline Bohnert for The New York Times



Comments (0)add comment

Write comment
You must be logged in to a comment. Please register if you do not have an account yet.

busy

submission guidelines | membership drive | link to us | privacy policy | terms of use | syndicate  | donate | sitemap
created and maintained by
Ahadada Books