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More William, by Richmal Crompton.
Chapter 10: The Helper

More William, by Richmal Crompton.
Read by me!
Chapter 9: The Revenge

More William, by Richmal Crompton.
Read by me!
Chapter 8: The May King

More William, by Richmal Crompton.
Read by me!
Chapter 7: The Ghost

As of today, October 30, 2007, LibriVox has 1000 free, legal, volunteer-read, downloadable audiobooks.

We’ve been counting down to the thousandth book, having no idea at all what it would be. It turned out to be a recording of Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, read by a relatively new volunteer, Reynard (who is a fine reader with a delicious accent), and cataloged by a brand new admin, kmerline. It was her first cataloging job! Yay Reynard and kmerline!

Download LibriVox’s 1000th book here:
http://librivox.org/the-murders-in-the-rue-morgue-by-edgar-allen-poe/

Way to go, LibriVox volunteers!!! Without each one of you, we wouldn’t have gotten where we are today.

Check our catalog. You’ll find lots more great books to listen to.

More William, by Richmal Crompton.
Read by me!
Chapter 6: The Rivals

More William, by Richmal Crompton.
Read by me!
Chapter 5: William’s Hobby

More William, by Richmal Crompton.
Read by me!
Chapter 4: The Knight at Arms

More William, by Richmal Crompton.
Read by me!
Chapter 3: William’s Burglar

More William, by Richmal Crompton.
Read by me.
Chapter 2: Rice-Mould

More William, by Richmal Crompton.
Chapter 1: A Busy Day

I’ve just finished cataloging my solo recording of More William, by Richmal Crompton. Jeremy wrote a really nice summary:

The second of Crompton’s series of 39 books about William Brown, our cheeky 11 year-old protagonist. A hero to some, a dastardly villain to others, this book is structured round a year in his life. Starting with William waking up on Christmas morning and ending with him going to sleep the following Christmas Eve, there are the usual round of misadventures, misunderstandings, and general mayhem in between. When a boy like William wakes up under a motto that says “A Busy Day Is A Happy Day” alongside a copy of “Things A Boy Can Do”, chaos is just around the corner. Includes the very first William short story – “Rice Mould”. Often dismissed as children’s literature, the first few books of William stories were probably aimed more at an adult audience. They resonate with a distinctly English humour, but there are obvious echoes from ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Huckleberry Finn’.

It’s a great book. You can download the whole thing here:
http://librivox.org/more-william-by-richmal-crompton/
Or subscribe to my podcast, or check my Audiobooks category for a new chapter every Monday.

William might remind you just a little bit of your favorite 11-year-old boy, though of course he’s much naughtier than any 11-year-olds that I know!

Cori has put together a marvelous Community Podcast for us this week. Her theme is “Sucking! (And how not to!).” At some point, every LibriVox volunteer worries about sucking. Cori goes over the things that can make a recording suck (too fast, too slow, background noise, etc.) and the things we might worry about that don’t actually suck (accents, non-native readers, etc.). She enlisted several volunteers to make mock-sucky recordings, which are hilarious, and there is lots of helpful and comforting advice. Do give it a listen!

LibriVox Community Podcast #54

(Plus you can hear me babbling on and on!)

It was a nice weekend. I finished six orange morsbags on Saturday and made five more flowered ones on Sunday, while listening to the LV community podcast, the LV new releases podcast, The Return of Sherlock Holmes and Loveline (Seth Green!). Also cataloged five new Librivox books:

Balzac, Honoré de. “Letters of Two Brides”
Buchan, John. “Greenmantle”
Davis, Noah. “Narrative of the Life of Rev. Noah Davis, A Colored Man, A”
Field, Eugene. “Love-Songs of Childhood”
Harris, William Shuler. “Life in a Thousand Worlds”

A nice variety there, something for everyone. Yes, at long last, the Letters are done! And there was much rejoicing! According to archive.org, it has already been “Downloaded 1,510 times” so someone out there must like Balzac better than Shell and I do.

And I recorded three chapters of More William (still need to edit two of them) and I baked bread, and I watched the end of BSG s3 with Dan (great last episode!), oh, and Henry was home for a few hours on Saturday while his dad played music somewhere. We all watched Star Wars. All the lameness is pretty much redeemed by the presence of Alec Guinness (somehow he’s able to make those stiff ridiculous lines sound good) and the great dogfight space battle at the end, in which stiff ridiculous lines don’t matter.

Also tried my hand at a couple of LV tutorial screencasts. I think I need to turn down the quality (over a gig for 11 minutes??) and maybe not let the window follow the mouse movements. Or not move my mouse around so quickly. I don’t want to cause motion sickness.

And my mitts are done but for the last thumb ribbing. Photos soon!

PC magazine lists us in their Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites. Librivox is in the left column, about halfway down. Cool! Lots of other good sites on that list, especially kiva.org and the extremely useful ZAMZAR (you just have to capitalize a name like that).

They even wrote a nice blurb about us:

Audiobooks are ridiculously expensive: The latest “Harry Potter” title lists at $80 on CD. Librivox, however, provides pod fodder for free. The site features a collection of public-domain books read by volunteers—and anyone can volunteer. The audio quality is good (MP3s at 64 or 128 Kbps, as well as OGG Vorbis files). Some narrators are better than others—some may have listened to a little too much NPR—but almost everything is at least decent, and some performances are quite good. The collection (a bit more than 800 Project Gutenberg works so far) is a bit of a hodgepodge, with everything from Walt Whitman to Edgar Rice Burroughs. You’ll have to wait about a hundred years for The Deathly Hallows, though.

Thanks, PC Mag!

The most recent LibriVox Community Podcast is great!

This week’s show is hosted by Sean McGaughey (ductapeguy). The theme of this week’s show is Plumbing or Unsung Heroes: The Librivox Technical Team.

1. An interview? with Senator Ted Stevens
2. A Series of Tubes by Joey Patterson featuring Senator Ted Stevens
3. In the Spotlight: Kara (kayray) interviews Dan (digisage)
4. Chris Goringe (tis)
5. Thanks to all the unsung heroes of the Librivox technical team

Click here to listen (right-click to download)

Here we are recording our interview:

Oh, you might also enjoy our New Releases podcast! I sure do!
New Releases, August 18th 2007

LibriVox volunteer Alan (Cloud Mountain) has put together our second New Releases podcast. Great job, Alan!

The New Releases Podcast is LibriVox’s twice-a-month sampling of new audiobooks available for free at LibriVox.org. LibriVox is an online volunteer community dedicated to producing free public-domain audiobooks.

Blog post with info, line-up, and feed here

Audio here

My Room with a View solo gets a mention, as well as many other interesting-sounding new audio books. I can highly recommend Peter Mink — a charming children’s book read by Lucy Burgoyne.

I’ve just finished cataloging my latest solo audio book recording:
A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster

As with all LibriVox audio books, this one is free for you to download, share, copy, mash-up, whatever. Enjoy!

In case you’re curious as to WHY our audio books are free and have no restrictions on their use, it’s because we record only public domain texts and release all our recordings back into the public domain. What is this “public domain” you say? From wikipedia:

Public domain comprises the body of knowledge and innovation (especially creative works such as writing, art, music, and inventions) in relation to which no person or other legal entity can establish or maintain proprietary interests within a particular legal jurisdiction. This body of information and creativity is considered to be part of a common cultural and intellectual heritage, which, in general, anyone may use or exploit, whether for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Only about 15 percent of all books are in the public domain, and 10 percent of all books that are still in print.

There. Now you know. An easy rule of thumb for books is: published before 1923 in the U.S. = Public Domain.

The last four chapters:

15 – Life of the Monastery
16 – Papacy and Empire
17 – The Hundred Years’ War
18 – End of the Middle Ages

12 – Later Crusades
13 – Life of the Castle
14 – Life of the Village and Town