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[andrelevy]

Hi all
my name is André Levy, and I'm 46. Although Portuguese, I've lived in New York State a total of 13 years, first during grade school, and afterwards during my PhD (I'm a biologist).

During this last period I devoured audio-books and the Great Lectures series from the NY Public Library system, at the time still on tape. I would hear them while driving, to fall asleep, during the monotonous, repetitive, everyday tasks that research also involves. During this period I also began acting at a community theater. I've been back in Portugal the last 14 years, where I continued activities as a biologist and teacher, and also as actor.

As soon as I returned, one thing I noticed was how audio-books had yet to establish themselves as a medium in its own right, in Portugal. I began slowly dreaming of producing them in Portuguese, but things got in the way. Since then there have been a few, but it has yet to make a true breakthrough, for lack of a genuine market strategy.

Last year I felt I really wanted to invest in this area. So I started reading out loud took some voice-over classes, bought a fair mic and started recording, put together a project to produce an audio-book, which finally seems to be gaining steam, involving the works of José Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel-prize winner. Curiously, as a teenager, I got into his writing in part because I started reading him out-load. That's what allowed me to understand his heterodox use of punctuation.

During the preparation stage, I searched the web for sites on voice recording, producing audio-books, and came across Librivox, which I found to be a great project, given its mission, collaborative nature, free access. Today, I remembered and visited the site again, to sign up for the forum, and get my feet wet in some collaborative projects.

I'm a native English and Portuguese speaker, and look forward to collaborating.

[TriciaG]

Welcome - good to have you!

You're welcome to join in on any of the group projects, especially at first so you can get a feel for how things are done around here. But it sounds like you've recorded before and know what it entails, so you may want to jump into solo projects fairly quickly, if that's your desire.

Something to keep in mind as a non-US reader is that you get to follow two sets of copyright laws. First, since our servers are located in the USA, LibriVox follows US copyright law. It's a very messy law, but in general, works published in 1922 or earlier are OK to use. Works published after 1922 and are available on gutenberg.org (with a "PD in the USA" note in its copyright status there), or are available in Full View on hathitrust.org are also OK. They've been researched to determine if their copyright was renewed or not, and have fallen out of copyright.

Second, you'll need to follow the copyright law of the country you're in. I believe Portugal is a Life+70 country, along with the rest of the EU. So in addition to the above US copyright, you should only work with authors who died in 1947 or earlier.

Hope this is helpful! Holler if you have questions.