Attention all fans of E. Nesbit – I’ve just finished my latest LibriVox solo, and it’s her mini autobiography My School Days. It’s very short, just a bit over two hours, and as she writes towards the end, covers only a few incidents from an astonishingly clearly-remembered childhood. Places that she lived, games that she played – and the things that scared her enough to give her nightmares for years — and to influence her wonderful horror stories for adults. She wasn’t always a very good child, and her honesty about that really does make for interesting stories!
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LibriVox has completed an unabridged recording of Henry Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body. It’ll take the keen student anatomist a little over 66 hours to go through once — and it only had one proof-listener through all five parts of the project, so there is at least one person in the world who’s done it. There are 44 readers, of whom I am one, contributing to the final part to edumacate listeners about The Digestive Apparatus and The Urinary Bladder. The book was split into five volumes for ease of completion and downloading, and each part links to the fully illustrated 1918 text, so those who wish can check out the diagrams at the same time. Newly available are free MP4 versions, as well as the usual archive.org free offerings of individual / zipped collection of MP3s and also OGGs.
As audiobooks go, this probably isn’t the most obvious choice for beach-listening or an absorbing commuting option. But there’s nothing else like it in the catalogue (yet!) and I sincerely hope it hits the spot for lots of listeners. We-at-LibriVox would love to know future listeners’ stories … why HAVE you picked this book..? There’s a new feedback feature available, which could be used for exactly this, or just sign up to the forum and post.
Enjoy, World!
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(18:26) — The Urinary Bladder.
If you think I’ve pronounced “ureter” or anything else wrong … I’m sorry, I did do my best, (including completely rerecording this chapter!) and Brit and US pronunciation vary all over the place.
There’ve been a few comments on an earlier post here, wishing that LibriVox would add a ratings system to its catalogue, so I thought I’d respond to them (and others, posted over time in the LibriVox forum).
Firstly, it’s TRUE that there are some few recordings that are problematic for various reasons. Some have content which causes certain listeners concern, but I’m not going to bother discussing censorship, I disapprove of it, end of story. However, where it’s down to the audio itself — some folks would like to be able to warn others to avoid these, or perhaps, target them to produce their own (hopefully better) versions. However, it’s an extremely central tenet of LibriVox that ALL readers are welcome. As long as they are able to record themselves audibly and stick to the text, it doesn’t matter about age, gender, accent, ability to ‘do voices’ or even whether they understand the book. And the rest of this post is where I contend that this is not only a Good Thing — but essential to LibriVox’s past and future success.
“But wouldn’t some kind of vetting or rating be a good thing for listeners?” It’s not going to happen, because it’s honestly not that easy. It’s not a question of “make people audition, and then only the ‘good’ people are allowed to record.”
For starters, the standards of measurement could vary a lot (as you can see by the bad reviews of professionally read audio-books.) The audience has a wide and sometimes contradictory range of ideas about what various members of it want to hear.
Then there’s the practical consideration of improvement — if “bad” readers can’t ever start, and therefore don’t get encouragement, feedback, gentle support, then they’ll never become “good” readers. The professionals are paying for coaching, they’re studying at drama school or voice-over classes. What’s available for free? On a global scale? In every language people are interested in reading?
To say LibriVox has NO quality control just isn’t fair — today. Historically, there was no proof-listening phase, and so yes, a number of finished recordings are too quiet to be heard. (And some are likely too loud!) Some have horrible background noise, or reading-stumbles left in. Some of these are being revisited as admins find time and energy. However, the books we are producing NOW have much better quality in these respects. Accented readers are still welcome, people still record with headset / pinhole mics — but technical problems can be picked up earlier and mitigated as best we can. Readers are given help with noise-cleaning, editing, general settings and volume … and if they aren’t able to do it themselves, someone else will polish it up before it’s catalogued. But at the end of the day, it’s the reader’s voice, pace, spoken words — no change in that.
But most of all, avoiding ratings is about supporting people’s self-esteem. And not in a tree-hugging, “isn’t everyone special” kind of way. In practice, very few contributors at LibriVox are professional actors / voice-over artists. They aren’t trained to extract what use they can out of criticism and then let the rest wash over them. If contributions are rated badly, especially early on in a reader’s recording career, they’ll simply stop and find a nicer way to spend their free time. Is that “saving the world from bad recordings”? Yep. So, how many people would be left to make recordings for the world? Impossible to say, but I’d bet it’s a pretty small percentage. Worst of all, it would put off even those who are generally considered “the best”, because few start out that way. Basically, it’s “saving the world from having a large, free audio-book library.” Audible would approve.
There are other online audio-projects who do insist on auditions before allowing people in (or simply record only using vouched-for actors.) They’ve produced a few hundred books, and are often pay-to-download because that’s the only way to subsidise the whole proceeding. LibriVox has completed 3,374 projects, and another 541 are in progress, and that’s been on zero budget, (though, true, the recent donations-drive changes things.) I can’t think of any other audio-projects which work across languages – all the ones I know are mono-lingual. LibriVox encourages people to record projects in 29 different languages (more if you count the contributions to multi-lingual collections.) I firmly believe that the “open doors” policy directly supports this diversity.
I think the main problem LibriVox has, is around educating its listeners. What many listeners want, I suspect, is completely free access to Audible. They’re frustrated because LibriVox is free-but-different (non-pro. voices, mixed voices in books, non-native voices, etc.) They think that just a few little changes, kicking out the very ‘worst’ readers, would fix things. But it doesn’t work like that. A small barrier to entry, however low, would stop all but the most determined voices (or the most pig-headed readers). And that’s not going to benefit anyone.
As an aside, all LibriVox recordings are public domain. There’s nothing to stop anyone setting up librivox-rated.com, linking through to the catalogue, or pulling recordings directly from archive.org. If rating recordings is as essential a part of the listening experience as those who’ve requested the feature over the years tend to claim — it’d be more popular than LV itself – and that’d be fine … we could concentrate on recording and let other people do the thorny decision-making. And of course, the more recordings there are, the more chance there is that some of them ARE “okay”, by the particular standards of any given listener.
It’s been a while, but I’ve got a new entry in the LibriVox catalogue besides short poetry readings. The History of Pompey the Little by Francis Coventry is a collaboratively-read canine saga, with a parade of interesting characters and wide range of social situations. I contributed three chapters and it seemed like the Dog Hero was rather forgotten about, in the fun of telling about his newest owners, but since I’m not a huge dog-person, that was fine with me. I’m not sure if the other chapters go this way, I’ve not listened to the finished work yet.
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Just found a funky Flash gadget which pulls Tweets on my chosen topics of “LibriVox”, “public domain” and “free audio” together into a nice dooflip. Would be awesome at conferences, where everyone’s got a hashtag in common!
I’ve been kicking around thoughts on how best to organise the LibriVox catalogue in the future, especially when the new design is implemented. LibriVox is a collection of people who speak many languages, and who record public domain audiobooks in most of them.
Currently, we organise by Category (out of Fiction, Poetry, Non-fiction, Dramatic Works — one per book) and by Genre (list here — multiple selections possible).
However, as our catalogue grows, I think it’s going to get harder and harder to manage this very fixed structure. As we add more books, we’ll need to add more Genres, and it will be a lot of work to retrospectively look over our books when a new Genre is added. For example, Art was recently added to the list, and older books about Art were added to the Genre by people who remembered them. But even with a relatively small number of relevant books involved, some can get missed, like Ruskin’s Lectures on Landscapes. Adding a Genre which would cover a lot of existing books becomes a bit of a nightmare, and there’s little incentive to add new Genres of this type. My point here is definitely not to second-guess the labellers, but to note that it’s going to be very hard to keep using this system when we have 5,000 books. By the time we get to 10,000, we’ll have literally thousands of books in some Genres and it’ll be very hard for listeners to find books that interest them, using the Genre system.
So, LibriVox has been running for over four years, on a budget of $0 … everyone at LibriVox is a volunteer, reading, listening and supporting audiobook production for free, because they think it’s fun in some way. Behind the scenes, all the costs have been taken care of by a few individuals, along with some generous donations from partners. We’ve made thousands of free audiobooks that have been downloaded by millions of people; our site gets 400,000 visitors every month. However, this success has a crappy downside — the costs have become too big to carry on managing in this way.
Hence, a big ol’ fundraising drive. There’s a specific target – $20,000; and in the first three days of the drive, we’ve raised about half of that! So, we still need a few more pennies in the pot. If you’re a satisfied LibriVox listener, please consider sending a little something to the Internet Archive, stating that it’s a “donation for LibriVox”. LibriVox is not an official entitity, doesn’t have a bank account or any kind of formal legal status … hence the Internet Archive (who host our files) managing the money side of this for us.
Here’s how the money’s going to be spent:
to cover hosting costs for our website (about $5,000/year)*, which includes:
the main LibriVox website & blog;
the forum;
the wiki;
the catalog;
a whole lot of back-end software to host and process audio before it goes to the Internet Archive
but does NOT include hosting our finished audio files which is done by The Internet Archive at archive.org
to redesign the site and improve its accessibility
to make the LibriVox catalog easier for listeners to use
to make the management software easier for admins to use
We are sincerely hoping that $20K will keep everything running for three years at least, including some room to keep on growing!
* See the main donation page for more information on how this is being spent, and why this probably ISN’T something that we can get “much cheaper somewhere else”.
I have donated already, and if you haven’t, and would like to — just click through to the LibriVox page that explains the process. The most important thing is to note, somewhere, that it IS a donation for LibriVox! Not that the Internet Archive in itself is not a worthy cause, but that’s for another day.
^^ CLICK ME ^^
P.S. Neither LibriVox, nor the Internet Archive, will store the emails of those donating: no spam threat there!
P.P.S. LibriVox’s Official Announcement, read by Ruth Golding:
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My first release of the New Year – a chapter contributed to What Katy Did Next by Susan Coolidge. I nabbed the section on her visit to England, and although it made me a little cross in places (we Brits have NOT “forgotten” Jane Austen, and I’m not sure there’s ever been a time we had … ) it’s a fun read overall. Plus, her plan in visiting literary landmarks of London is a splendid idea.
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(24:26)
There’s also a new podcast out … I was sent an interesting contribution for the 2009-retrospective by Nicholas, which inspired me to do an entire show on the subject of actively developing resources for language-learning at LibriVox. It’s already a great place to find lots of recordings in many different languages, often by native speakers with varied accents, to help ‘train the ear’. However, we’ve also been working on Primers, Grammars and other intructional material, in several languages, to help people learn. The podcast includes an introduction to the subject, a perspective from Leni who’s recording a Portuguese primer, some samples from different books — and most splendidly, the slight downside of recording books over 100 years old … you’ll be learning how to ask your coachman how long the horses will need to rest, and how to request sealing wax and a light (for sending your postal cards!) Availle quotes from a German/English text, what a hoot!
Lest that put people off, Leni also mentioned this, and notes that most of the book she’s working on is as good today as it was when it was written — even in places you wouldn’t expect!
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So, another volume from the histories of that fictitious country, Graustark, has been released. No strange accents snuck into this one (in a previous volume, an otherwise innocent-looking character came out of my mouth with a deep, gentle Transylvanian lilt, which oddly, wasn’t inappropriate, but was a huge surprise since I hadn’t planned it in any way.) I only contributed one chapter this time, though, who knows what might have happened with more.
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I’ve been recording a few other collaborative chapters, but nothing else has popped out into the catalogue yet. Mainly, though, I’ve working on a podcast duo — one looking back at 2009 (completed & released) and one looking forward to 2010 (due this Thursday). Hoping to receive a few more contributions for the 2010 one, since it’s a little short as it stands. The request-post is in the forum here, if you’re interested.
Finally, apologies to people subscribed to the RSS feed here, if old posts popped up all day yesterday marked as new! I had a big clearout of catagories, added some logical new ones, and did some behind-the-scenes tidying and planning. In 2010, I’m intending to write here more often, about the process of making audiobooks at home, LibriVoxing generally, and about the public domain. (And hopefully not use that as a way of procrastinating over producing actual audio, too!)
