August 25, 2006

Public Domain Books, Ready for Your iPod

By CRAIG SILVERMAN

Kara Shallenberg and her
10-year-old son, Henry, exhausted the audiobook collection at their
library in Oceanside, Calif., five years ago. With Henry’s appetite for
listening still strong, Ms. Shallenberg began to record herself reading
his favorite books. Eventually she upgraded from a using a tape deck to
burning CD’s on her laptop computer. Last fall she took her hobby to a
wider audience. 

Ms. Shallenberg’s recordings of “The Secret Garden,” “The Tale of
Peter Rabbit” and other works are now available, free, to anyone with
an Internet connection and basic audio software. She is part of a core
group of volunteers who give their voices and spare time to LibriVox, a
project that produces audiobooks of works in the public domain.

“Everything I read to Henry was copyrighted,” Ms. Shallenberg said,
adding that she was frustrated she couldn’t share those works. “The
idea of creating audiobooks that other people could enjoy was exciting.”

LibriVox is the largest of several emerging collectives that offer
free or inexpensive audiobooks of works whose copyrights have expired,
from Plato to “The Wind in the Willows.” (In the United States, this
generally means anything published or registered for copyright before
1923.) The results range from solo readings done by amateurs in
makeshift home studios to high-quality recordings read by actors or
professional voice talent.

At its worst a free audiobook can sound like a teenager reading
aloud in high school English class. At its best it can offer excellent
sound quality and skilled narration infused with a passion for the
text. In between is a world of competent readings, sometimes spiced
with affected accents, mumbled words and distant car horns and
reflecting all manner of literary interpretations.

LibriVox celebrated its anniversary on Aug. 10, around the same time
it surpassed the 100-book mark. It also offers more than 200 recordings
of short stories, plays, speeches, poems and documents like the Magna
Carta and the Declaration of Independence. By comparison the audiobook
industry, which typically sells recordings for $15 to $30, released
3,430 titles, taking in $832 million, in 2004, the last year for which
figures are available.

LibriVox’s founder, Hugh McGuire, 32, a software developer and
writer in Montreal, said there were another 100 works in development,
all of which would be recorded, edited and uploaded by volunteers.

“The principles of the project are to be totally noncommercial,
totally ad free, totally volunteer and totally public domain,” he said.
Readers can volunteer at the Web site, librivox.org.

One of LibriVox's colleagues in the free audiobook realm is Telltale Weekly (telltaleweekly.org), which sells recordings for 25 cents to $8, but makes them available at no charge through its Spoken Alexandria Project (spokenalex.org) after five years or 100,000 downloads, whichever comes first. It was founded in 2004 by Alex Wilson, a writer and actor in Chapel Hill, N.C., who performs many of the readings. Another service, LiteralSystems (literalsystems.org), has 51 works available for free download and emphasizes their professional quality.

The audio format of choice for each service is MP3 (though Spoken Alexandria and LibriVox offer other options), which means the audiobooks can play on any computer and most digital music players. Unlike with commercial audiobooks, listeners are free to copy and share the recordings.

All three services rely on Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org), the online repository of works in the public domain, for texts. Listeners often can choose from several recordings of the same work; LibriVox, for example, offers three readings of the Gettysburg Address. Among the most recorded authors are Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Jack London, L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, William Shakespeare and Lucy Maud Montgomery (''Anne of Green Gables'').

LibriVox's volunteers, who record solo or in collaboration, are restricted in their material only to previously published works in the public domain in the United States. This open policy has let the personal preferences of readers shine through, Mr. McGuire said.

''If someone turned up with a smut book from 1850, we would do it,'' he said. ''We did 'Fanny Hill,' which is an early erotic Victorian book. Everyone was laughing in the discussion forums about having to keep quiet while recording so their kids wouldn't hear them.''

Other LibriVoxers have proposed reading the Koran (some have already read chapters of the Bible), recording Supreme Court decisions and reciting pi to an unknown, but you can assume lengthy, number of digits. A multilingual recording of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights is underway, as is a full cast recording of ''The Pirates of Penzance.''

While some listeners object to the wide variety of recording quality, Mr. McGuire said, ''our take on it is if you think a recording is done badly, then please do one and we'll post it as well.''

LibriVox has more than 1,800 registered volunteers, and its audience continues to grow.

''Last week I listened to an early Agatha Christie novel as I shopped for groceries, chopped vegetables, sewed a hem or took my walk,'' Arlene Goldbard, a writer and social activist in Richmond, Calif., wrote on her blog after enjoying her first LibriVox recording in June.

The other free audiobook services are more centralized in their administration, often with one person doing most of the work and recording (meaning listeners had better enjoy that person's voice and narration style). They tend to select works with the best chance of gaining mass appeal, and put an emphasis on maintaining consistent production values.

Warren Smith, the founder of LiteralSystems, searches out local actors and voice talent in Santa Fe, N.M., where he lives. He also actively seeks donations and sponsorships to finance his work and help pay performers.

''I started with a MiniDisc recorder and now have a little 8-by-8-foot recording studio,'' he said. ''The end focus is matching commercial quality,'' while keeping the recordings free.

Over the last year Ms. Shallenberg has read more than 200 individual chapters and six novels for LibriVox, in addition to shorter works. She also turned her son Henry from an audiobook fan to a budding voice talent who has recorded some of Aesop's fables.

''I would be surprised if he didn't keep doing recordings, because he loves audiobooks,'' she said. ''When you love something that much, you want to get involved.''

Spreading the Literary Word

A guide to the audiobook projects mentioned in this article; all offer free downloads:

LIBRIVOX -- Founded in 2005. Mission statement: ''Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audiobooks.'' Titles available: 100 books and more than 200 shorter works, including poems, short stories, speeches; librivox.org.

Worth downloading: ''The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'' by Washington Irving, read by Chip; ''Chapters From My Autobiography'' by Mark Twain, read by John Greenman; ''The Pilgrim's Progress'' by John Bunyan, read by Joy Chan; ''China and the Chinese'' by Herbert Allen Giles, read by David Barnes; the LibriVox Anniversary Program 2006, a sampling of recordings with some project history and bloopers thrown in.

LITERALSYSTEMS -- Founded in 2003. Mission statement: ''We endeavor to create a great listening experience for our audience free of charge, and with no commercial advertising.'' Titles available: 23 novels and short stories, 19 poems, 9 nonfiction works; literalsystems.org.

Worth downloading: ''The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' by Mark Twain, read by Marc Devine; ''The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, read by Jane Aker, who also reads what promises to be a high-quality recording of Charles Dickens's ''Tale of Two Cities'' to be released next week.

THE SPOKEN ALEXANDRIA PROJECT -- Founded in 2004. Mission statement: ''To build an audiobook equivalent of Project Gutenberg one text at a time.'' Titles available: 5 novels, 15 nonfiction works and 1 poem; spokenalex.org. (More recordings are available for 25 cents to $8 at the sister site telltaleweekly.org.)

Worth downloading: ''Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water'' by Kelly Link, read by Alex Wilson; ''Getting Past Being Joe Blow Neopro'' by Tobias S. Buckell, read by Alex Wilson.

Worth buying (at telltaleweekly.org): ''The War of the Worlds'' by H. G. Wells, read by James Spencer ($8); ''Murder at Woodside Village,'' a Yuri Rasovsky audio drama based on the story by William H. Patton and performed by a full cast before a live audience ($2.75). CRAIG SILVERMAN