About Free Audiobooks

The Weird, Obsessive World of Free DIY Audiobooks

John Adamian | October 5, 2015

LibriVox is like Audible, the audiobook service owned by Amazon, except that every book is made for free by volunteers, and every book was published before 1923. A legion of volunteer readers—from professional stage actors to people practicing reading English as a second language—patiently, and sometimes not so patiently, inch through thousands of texts, posting the end results for free. The most popular audiobooks on LibriVox— for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Moby-Dick, and Pride and Prejudice—have been downloaded or streamed more than 2 million times. Since LibriVox started in 2005, over 8,000 texts have been recorded, edited and posted to the site by over 6,000 readers. Other volunteers work on the editing of the audio files and checking for accuracy.

Caltha Crowe at Tapeworks recording studio. Source: https://www.responsiveclassroom.org/blog/making-sammy-audiobook

<more at http://www.wired.com/2015/10/weird-wold-of-librivox/; related links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibriVox (LibriVox) and https://librivox.org/pages/volunteer-for-librivox/ (Volunteer for LibriVox)>