Solo opportunities

dustman33 · Post by **dustman33** » March 5th, 2022, 5:52 am

I am a recent newbie to Librivox narration and I am enjoying the experience immensely. However I would really appreciate seeing solo reading opportunities posted in the forum the same way that collaborative projects are.

Although solo book suggestions are available some of us don’t have the wherewithal to sift through the myriad books in the Gutenberg library for projects.

I know there are many out there with far more knowledge of the literary world than I who could come up with some great ideas and get more interesting solo projects started.

Howard Skyman

Post by **Availle** » March 5th, 2022, 6:38 am

There is a whole forum filled with book suggestions that may be read solo or group or dramatic... It's roughly 3000 topics, many of which come with more than one book to choose from:

viewforum.php?f=1

As for finding stuff that's "important" or "worthwhile" or whatever classification you'd want to give it to add to our catalog, well... Our mission is "To record all books in the public domain..." - so if it's important/worthwhile for you, that's perfectly fine with us.

Post by **TriciaG** » March 5th, 2022, 7:03 am

I was going to pull suggestions I've made in Book Suggestions, but there are so many good ones, I don't know what to choose. Ha ha!

Here are the suggestions I've posted:
search.php?st=0&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&author=triciag&fid%5B%5D=1&sf=firstpost

I usually do try to say whether it'd be a good first solo, or how long the book will be. Maybe start here and see if anything piques your interest.

Penumbra · Post by **Penumbra** » March 5th, 2022, 9:15 am

LV has catalogued only the one book by John Luther Langworthy that you contributed to. Gutenberg has three more, so if you enjoyed the aeroplane boys you might consider doing another one as a solo. I've done that with several authors I liked; it makes the Gutenberg search much less daunting.

flavo5000 · Post by **flavo5000** » March 8th, 2022, 8:39 am

One thing that could help is to have more genre-based or theme-based stickies in the Book Suggestions similar to how the Multi-Volume works and non-English threads are stickied. For instance, I and kadath keep up to date a couple of threads compiling horror/ghost/weird tales to act as a kind of one-stop-shop for anyone looking for unrecorded stories in that genre. I know there's also the Science Fiction thread, an occult books thread, a Newbury Honor thread, physics books, etc. And I'm sure people would also welcome stickied threads for unrecorded themes like Myths and Folklore, Victorian romance, action/adventure, political non-fiction, etc. (just based on the sorts of books I see being recorded regularly).

Thoughts?

Post by **TriciaG** » March 8th, 2022, 9:03 am

My initial thought is, who would maintain the thread(s) to keep them up to date? It's a BIG task.

My second thought is, we don't want to force people to jump through more hoops. If they're allowed to still post a thread with their suggestion without getting a "you should have posted this in the Victorian Romance suggestion thread!" response, then I'll feel better about it.

Newbies have enough barriers already; we don't want to put up more.

Third thought: when everything is priority, nothing is priority. A bunch of stickied threads will make them less prominent.

But don't take this as an official answer. They're just my own personal thoughts.

flavo5000 · Post by **flavo5000** » March 8th, 2022, 9:15 am

TriciaG wrote: ↑March 8th, 2022, 9:03 am My initial thought is, who would maintain the thread(s) to keep them up to date? It's a BIG task.

My second thought is, we don't want to force people to jump through more hoops. If they're allowed to still post a thread with their suggestion without getting a "you should have posted this in the Victorian Romance suggestion thread!" response, then I'll feel better about it. Newbies have enough barriers already; we don't want to put up more.

Third thought: when everything is priority, nothing is priority. A bunch of stickied threads will make them less prominent.

But don't take this as an official answer. They're just my own personal thoughts.

Oh they definitely wouldn't be required to post in those threads. I was thinking just more from a discoverability standpoint. And as for thread owners for them, maybe just post a request in the Additional volunteer opportunities section for someone to volunteer to own them. So then only someone who is passionate about doing it will open one. And if a particular genre/theme goes unclaimed, then that implies there just isn't demand for it to begin with so it solves itself.

To solve the "everything/nothing priority issue", rather than being stickies in the main Suggestions section, maybe create a sub-section under Suggestions for Genre/Theme threads or something to that effect, so it wouldn't necessarily clog up the main thread with stickies but still be easily discoverable for people who are looking for specific kinds of stories.

Post by **mightyfelix** » March 8th, 2022, 4:38 pm

As far as discoverability, I find that the search feature does a great job as is. If I want to BC a science book, for instance, I can search the book suggestions forum for the word "science" and get a bunch of interesting selections. It's not perfect, of course. There may be suggestions there that don't have the word "science" in the post, but rather "biology" or "botany." But it works for me, and I don't mind poking around a bit to find something good.

My thoughts are basically: keep it simple. Setting up new structures and new systems is difficult and time consuming. If there is another genre that you'd like to start and maintain a thread for, then please do! But even just compiling a list of genres that we want people to "adopt" would be a big task. Which genres should we include? How specific should they be?

What's more, I wouldn't want to ask anyone to maintain a list like this if it will take their focus away from recording and proof listening. Book suggestions are great, and I do enjoy it when our members choose to "curate" the book suggestions forum, but it should be just that: their choice, their idea. It's a bonus, but it's not necessary. If admins start recruiting people to maintain a genre thread over there, people will get the impression that that is a priority, when it is really only a means to an end.