LibriVox Forum

so I'm new. One guy in my book club is a delivery driver and does a lot of the audiobooks because he is always in traffic. Another guy, the oldest member, for whom we all have the utmost respect, quit the group because of failing eyesight. So I'd like to get involved for all those who do audiobooks and those who can no longer read and everyone in between !!

Hi there and welcome!

LV records books that are public domain in the US, which is mainly those that have been published before 1924.
Additionally, we encourage our members to adhere to their own country's copyright lenght (usually year of death of author PLUS a certain number of years, often 70).

George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" was published in 1936, so that's a no-go, I'm afraid.

Public domain= on or before 1923. (So Emily of New Moon is PD, for example, but some books by Agatha Christie are not PD, due to legal affairs.)

Glad to hear you're enthusiastic about getting involved here- if you get stuck, watch some of Phil's videos (the sticky at the top of this forum.)

Welcome to LibriVox!

That's a pretty simplistic answer. Like most legal stuff, it's the "never the less and notwithstanding" that occupy the next 100 pages
So as Ava said, published before 1924 is PD in the USA, so if the text is scanned online with a published date showing it is PD for us. But reading from a later edition is not.
Project Gutenberg - the USA one - has a legal team so we accept texts from there as long as the bibrec tag says it is PD - there are a few texts there which are not.
This is not a complete statement, but enough to get started.
However, it's a pretty safe bet that if it's a well-known book by a well-known author and it's not in the catalogue it's not PD

Anne