LibriVox

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

LibriVox

Established	August 2005
Collection size	over 1530 audiobooks
Website	http://www.librivox.org

LibriVox is a digital library of free public domain audiobooks, read by volunteers. The project started in August 2005, and as of 2008-06-07 had a catalog of roughly 1,532 full-length, unabridged books and shorter works. LibriVox recordings are mostly in English, followed by German, and then French, however recordings are available in over twenty-one languages.

LibriVox is a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project. LibriVox volunteers record Public Domain books, both in solo projects with only one reader for an entire book (roughly half of the collection), and in collaborative projects with several readers participating. All LibriVox books are released with a public domain dedication. The audio books are available through their Web site, with the audio housed by the Internet Archive, and through other venues, such as iTunes. Their goal is to make all public domain books available, for free, in audio format on the Internet.

The majority of LibriVox source texts come from Project Gutenberg.

LibriVox has become one of the most prolific audiobook publishers in the world, producing 60-70 books a month. About 1,800 volunteers have contributed audio recordings to the project; and a catalog that includes classics, such as Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Moby-Dick, The Bible, Darwin's Origin of the Species, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Marx's Communist Manifesto, and many other well-known, and lesser-known works.