LibriVox Forum

Hi! I am Korean, and I want to read Korean books in Librivox.
Is it permitted? Are there any books to read?

It is permitted.

We have two projects right now that are accepting stories (not whole books) in all languages.

One for Christmas related stories:
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=53240

and another for any story you like to pick:
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=51051

If you can find a story in Korean that is Public Domain you'd be welcome to submit it to either of those. It is a good place to start, before committing to a whole book.

Project Gutenberg only has a short English-to-Korean dictionary.
This article might help you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_literature

And here are some examples on Archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/koreanfolktalesi00impaiala
Korean folk tales: imps, ghosts and fairies (1913)
Author: Im, Pang, 1640-1724; Yi, Yuk, 1438-1498;
Translator: Gale, James Scarth, 1863-1937

https://archive.org/details/cu31924023333077
The cloud dream of the nine, a Korean novel : a story of the times of the Tangs of China about 840 A.D (1922)
Author: Kim, Man-jung, 1637-1692;
also trans by James Scarth Gale
Works in Korean by Man-jung Kim:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Kim%2C+Man-jung%2C+1637-1692%22

Original works by 17th Century poet Choe Chiwon:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=Choe%20Chiwon%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts

Jessie, it's probably hard to find books in Korean online. I have tried last night, but could not find anything useful. Here are the places we get many of our books from:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ (but they only have the dictionary BT links to)
https://archive.org/details/texts (some Korean authors, but the books are written in Chinese characters)
http://hathitrust.com/ (which I did not check)

you can also try
http://books.google.com/

in any case: any book that you want to record for us MUST have been published BEFORE 1923, otherwise it's not allowed. It is probably hard to find such books online, but you'll never know...


BT:
This "Cloud Dream" of yours sounds interesting, but it's probably not the right thing to read for a 14 year old (checked the intro? ) I'll bookmark it for myself though - onto my endless list it goes...

The problem with the Korean poet is that these books are written with Chinese characters, which are not taught in Korean schools anymore (at least not to the extent that an average Korean could read those books in the original). What we need are books written in Hangeul / Hangul, the modern Korean syllabary.

Thank you Availle, and the rest of replyers.

I searched in gutenberg, but there was no original Hangul novels or poetry...
It is hard to record with my first language.
I would like to try more if Hangul books appear in the links.

Hello Jessie san,

How about Kim_Dong-in (김동인)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dong-in
http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EA%B9%80%EB%8F%99%EC%9D%B8

He wrote several books.
약한 자의 슬픔(1919년)
목숨(1921년)
배따라기(1921년)
태형(1922년)

Please try to search the text.
If they are not good for you, I'll try to find another authors.

Cheers,
Masa