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A survey of the free-to-use audiobook sites on the web

Librivox

http://librivox.org/

Librivox has a selection of audiobooks that cover a wide range – ancient, modern, poetry, novels, philosophy, comedy and even a few French and German language productions.

There are drawbacks.  After sampling a few works these are plain.  The quality is variable: some work is excellent, some atrocious, most in-between.

With some of Librivox’s novels the reader changes every chapter.  This approach, which could be acceptable - even an advantage - in poetry, short stories or with any other self-contained material, simply does not do any favours when used for novels.

This is particularly the case with the ever present fear that when you download one crucial chapter, you may find the work of that particular narrator to be dreadful.

 

 

What exactly are we complaining about?

If you have ever played around with a microphone on your home computer, you might have produced a short voice recording.  After listening to it you might have thought it was well below the quality you expected – too much hiss, too much background noise etc.  You may then have decided to improve the audio quality and put your recording through some noise-reducing software.  Afterwards you may well have found that the recording sounded worse after being improved thus and thought “Ooooooh,well!” and left it.

If so then the result you produced might give an indication of the kind of quality some of the productions on Librivox fail to reach.

Professional Audio Book Readers

 

Do not try this at home

If that is the main downside, what is the upside?  One: a large selection and two: all in the public domain (at least in the United States).  This means after some quality checking (it is compulsory believe me), you are free to use the recordings for pretty much any purpose you desire.  And there is actually plenty of real quality to find here, the problem is the awfulness to be waded through.  

But remember to be careful of copyright.  Agatha Christie’s earliest work – for instance – may be copyright free in the US where Librivox is based, but this is not the case in all territories.  Differences in copyright laws should always be borne in mind when surfing the unbounded oceans of the World Wide Web.