New audiobook: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

I’m a little behind on my blogging, but never mind — here is my FIRST Legamus solo completed! A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, free in MP3 format with a total running time is just over four hours, across six files.

Legamus, of course, is a parallel enterprise to LibriVox, for those readers and listeners not in the US, but rather in Countries with Life + 70 copyright laws (also including Life + 50 countries and Australia which uses 50 or 70 depending on when authors passed away.) So, Virginia Woolf, who died in 1941, is public domain in the UK and Europe, as well as many other places, and I’m looking forward to recording more of her work for that audience.

A Room of One’s Own is an expanded version of a university lecture and was published in 1929. It’s an interesting blend of personal and theoretical thinking, and was wonderful to read because she has such an ear for words and thoughts. There were only a very few places where I got out of breath due to the length of a sentence, which is not always common for adult writing of that time.

I’ve licenced the recording as Public Domain, as something of an experiment. Legamus allows any of the Creative Commons licences to be used, but so far at LibriVox I’ve had little bother with people selling my work in ways that offend me (which is almost exclusively where people offer it for paid download, since buyers could get it for free direct from the source!) I don’t mind people printing CDs from it, and I love people adapting what I’ve done into new formats, especially music and spoken-word work. So we’ll see.

You can visit the book’s download page here: http://legamus.eu/blog/?p=153 and, assuming you are not based in the US, Mexico or Columbia, or any other country with a higher copyright than Life+70, you can entirely legally use the links there to download individual MP3 files or a zip containing the whole book (115MB.) Currently we’re using ge.tt to store our files, as none of the European organisations similar to archive.org have had any interest in publicly submitted files — very much unlike archive.org which has always been greatly supportive of LibriVox and many other community enterprises. A shame!