MaW’s Blog

Whether you like books or not, you have to admit that Project Gutenberg is a worthwhile idea.

LibriVox is to audiobooks what Project Gutenberg is to text. What is it about? Well, it’s a simple recipe. Take a public domain work — the wonderful PG contributers have ensured that there are many to choose from. Get a microphone, your computer and some recording software. Read the work aloud. Put it on the internet. Simple. Well okay, not quite that simple, but LibriVox have clear, sensible guidelines and lots of help and advice available.

LibriVox hosts a growing catalogue of public domain audiobooks read by volunteers from all over. Some are read by one person, some by many. Dramas may even be read by many different people, one for each character. Sure the quality varies, but it’s there, it’s understandable, and it’s free.

And now, it’s got my voice on it too. Something useful I can do while working on my speaking skills? Sign me up!

So far, I’ve done a few poems, a very small part from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde, a couple of chapters of Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood by George MacDonald, and what will be the third English recording of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - once I go and edit it, that is.

So maybe that last is a bit redundant, but nobody’s read it with an English accent yet.

I should also mention that the project has been in existence for one year now, and they have an anniversary podcast. According to the blooper segment, as well as being plagued by all the diction and pronunciation problems which affect me (not to mention equipment malfunctions), there is also a chronic problem with cats interrupting the recording.