While Librivox persists in this crazy “quantity over quality” attitude, it’s the only way for people to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I don’t know how many times I’ve started clicked through some really good works, sampling a few seconds of each before downloading the whole thing, to find that the hard and conscientious work of many good readers is ruined by… well, Walter above has a classic example of one of the worst, and I’m in 100% agreement.

This is about the LISTENER, Cori. Librivox is seen from the outside by many as a therapeutic outlet for the kind of people, who, vocally, are the equivalent of the kind of people who they show on X-Factor because they’re just…so…bad!

And people WILL say what they think. Doesn’t take much googling to find some pretty frustrated listeners giving some pretty harsh opinions, having had their ears melted and their book ruined yet again by someone attacking a $1 store headset mic with reading that would embarrass most primary school children. I think at least a basic rule should be that the reader knows what punctuation is and does!

Anyway, point made. Catalogue is OK as it is, it just NEEDS a rating system.

Reading from China, Nelly takes one of the book’s best and crucial chapters and turns it into an hour of garbled torture. English is her second language – she says, for example, “Addison” instead of Edison and “lightening” instead of lighting – the recording quality is awful and there are background traffic noises.

This is a person who desperately needs to be told that she needs a lot of improvement, fast, and that she spoiled what could have been a pleasant hour of entertainment and enlightenment.

I don’t ask for much – just clear, distinct reading. If a great reader, like you or Kara or Graham Redman, comes along, so much the better. But I can live with the lesser lights, many of whom are quite good indeed. My only peeve is that too often a perfectly fine collaboration will be spoiled by someone who had no business intruding himself or herself into it.

As for the catalogue issue, I suppose that you’re the expert on the subject. (You were too deep for me, I must admit, when you said: “Also, that tends to become either a popularity contest, etc.”) And I agree with you that one of Librivox’s main attractions is its ability to breathe new life into “really wonderful old tomes” which most readers wouldn’t have stumbled across no matter how long they surfed the internet.

Anyway, no matter how you slice it, Librivox is great stuff and is sure to gain in popularity. I’m reminded of a passage from Edison’s biography – not, thankfully, one of the chapters read by Nelly – in which Edison takes his newly invented gramaphone to President Garfield’s White House. So many people crowded into the president’s sitting room that the Secret Service feared that the floor would collapse under him.

That said, there’s a busy whirl of reviews at archive.org, and not all of those are encouraging or constructive. (And the negative / derogatory ones have chilled some readers, which is a loss to the public domain overall.) I don’t think it’s a choice between Quality and Quantity, and I’m sure that a focus on the former would disproportionately affect the latter. But anyway, sorry – this is a favourite rant topic!

As for the cataloguing, I think it’s worth having something within our catalogue which helps people choose what to listen to next, because it seems clunky to make people go outside LibriVox, find book recommendations, and then come back in to see which ones we’ve recorded. Also, that tends to become either a popularity contest (lists which start on Pride & Prejudice and end with Jane Eyre) or else reverse snobbery (dullsville, mile-long novels, that LibriVox only records because the mission is “ALL books in the public domain”. There are some really wonderful old tomes out there that deserve a new revival, and that’s best targetted to listeners who might appreciate them most. Not that I’ve really worked out how that might look, but I think it’ll be increasingly important as the catalogue grows.

I sometimes order cable pay-per-view movies and am annoyed to see them categorized as Drama, Horror, Science Fiction, Western, etc. (Is “Billy the Kid vs. Dracula” horror or Western?) You can never be sure that you’ve seen every title until you’ve gone through all of the lists, most of which are bound to contain redundant entries.

I think that, apart from an alphabetical catalogue, a simple arrangement by the author’s date of birth, and then perhaps by his or her nationality, might be the best way to go. Every century of ancient times, say, and every decade of modern ones, could have their own pages. And as in the Classical Music Archive – another fine internet resource – prominent artists could be highlighted and perhaps even have their own pages.

People searching for a particular book shouldn’t rely on Librivox to find it. Instead, they should turn to a little resource called the internet. It’s not perfect, but it certainly contains more information than any single web site possibly could.

Likewise, I don’t know about tagging. What I’d most like to see a system of voting, so that listeners could easily and effectively opine about the thing which should matter most to Librivox, namely the quality of its recordings. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to praise a great reader, or to excoriate an awful one – but where? Only a handful of interested persons will see my remarks on the Librivox forum.

I second the previous comment: thanks as always for your hard work, Cori. Like you, Librivox is a wonderful invention. Who knew that Thomas Edison was, among many, many other things, the father of modern astronomy?

Thanks for your tremendous contribution! I think tagging the books is the way to go. That way, listeners can enter keywords even if the genre is unknown or hasn’t been created. Also, there have been times when I have remembered a book that was read to me when I was little–or I could remember what the book was about, character names, and such–and couldn’t remember the title nor who wrote it. It helps to be able to search for a “key phrase” along with key words. I don’t know how hard it’ll be to set something like that up. Thanks again for all of your work.