LibriVox Forum

Have there been any discussions about hooking up somehow with other websites that offer free audio books?

Slightly off topic - what other sites are there? I only seem to find "free if you sign up for a membership" , and ones that have ours and forget to mention where they come from ? . I know I got here via another site , but can't seem to get back there.

Anne

Hook up, how?

And how would hooking up help us with our prime objective: to make audiobooks of all PD books?

We could link to Legamus more prominently. (For things PD in Europe but not America, if you've not come across this LV off-shoot before.)

And I know there are quite a few old-time radio drama series that are in the PD - they are very similar to audiobooks and I expect there are sites that collect those, although I wouldn't know where to start looking.

Ages ago, in off topic, there was someone who did a regular podcast of PD sci-fi stories - I don't think they solely used LV, I think they narrated a lot of them themself.

Also, these days there are a lot of online magazines which print new stories by contemporary authors and place some or all of their contents online for free (and run off donations or voluntary subscriptions.) Often these will include podcasts of some of the stories.

I know Strange Horizons does this, as does Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Apex and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Tor does a bit as well. And I'm sure there are similar sites for genres that aren't sci-fi or fantasy, those are just the ones I visit.

I don't personally frequent http://www.starshipsofa.com/ but that seems to be a similar business model.

(And lest someone go - 'Modern stories, online for free? Clearly rubbish!' - many of these stories have won awards, and many of the authors have traditionally published books as well. And of course Tor is a print publisher in their own right.)

And obviously the BBC Radio stations are available online, and any audio books that they do can be accessed for a period of time after their initial broadcast.

There is a ton of modern, legal fiction - audio and written - available for free once you know where to look. While I don't know if any of this (except for Legamus, which should be mentioned somewhere in the About I think, given it was founded by European LVers to do exactly the same thing as we do) has a place on LV proper, it could certainly be a wiki page. Many of our volunteers enjoy listening to audio-books as well as creating them, and most of the sites I mentioned have things available that we couldn't provide for over 70+ years.

Hi Folks,

I hope I did not give the impression of abandoning this thread since I started it, time constraints and priorities, etc.

My general thoughts are based upon Star Trek as I'm a Trekkie. A member of the Enterprise's crew will ask the computer a question and this Star Trek computer has the total of human knowledge in its memory banks which it can draw on to respond to any query.

It was from this perspective that I fell in love with Gutenberg Press, now Gutenberg.org, and their Five Year Mission to make all public domain literature available as simple ASCII text files for the use and benefit of humanity for all time.

This dream is what brought me to LibriVox, the edification of humankind and what not.

I've spent some time searching the web for other free audio books and have found some sites (I'll post the list later.)

My hope for both LibriVox and Gutenberg is a sort of one-stop-shop. In terms of the written word, the web is already fragmented; public domain text files are spread far and wide, so far and wide that there is no one place to look for them.

I am hoping that somehow LibriVox can become a one-stop-shop.

I think you're fighting a losing battle there, I'm afraid. Even if you did manage to hunt down and link to all the free audio sites in existence, someone could start up a new one the next day and not think to tell us about it. (A person who didn't know about our list, or just assumed they would show up there automatically.)

While it's a noble idea to have us as the main site that links to all others - the one-stop shop - it's not our mission. Our mission is to make audiobooks. We'll leave it to someone else to index and link together all the free audiobook sites.

Not our mission, got it. Thanks for thinin on it with me.