LibriVox’s second birthday
Almost two years ago I encouraged TeleBlog readers to go and watch the building of the LibriVox boom-town. LibriVox is a project that lets volunteers create human-read audio books. Well, apparently the “town” now has its own radio station, and in celebration of the site’s second birthday on August 10, the LibriVox Community Podcast people interviewed founder Hugh McGuire for their 48th podcast.
Some of the things that have happened to LibriVox are the record-breaking months of March and July, when 70 and 72 audio books were produced respectively. The project more than doubled its output in the second year, going from 256 audio books for the first year to 546 for the second. Project Gutenberg started posting LibriVox versions of its e-texts. The thousandth reader helped read a book for LibriVox in April this year. Interestingly, the LibriVox forum has over 5,000 registered users, four times the current number of readers. Some of those are blind proof-listeners.
Exactly two years ago I posted a small bit about LibriVox here, and intrigued by the project decided to help out with a chapter of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. This week Jim Mowatt of the LibriVox Community Podcast asked me to talk a bit about that experience. You can find my contribution in the podcast, of course (at 40:30), and in text form below the fold.
Happy birthday, Librivox!
Hi, my name is Branko Collin, and I am one of the readers of the first Librivox book, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.
Two years ago I posted a small message at the TeleRead blog saying that LibriVox was starting up, and that they were looking for volunteers. I am a Project Gutenberg volunteer myself, and one of the problems we PG volunteers have is that we never know what is going to happen to the books we produce. They might be read across the world, or they might linger in digital vaults. So a project like LibriVox actually allows us to do something with our own products; it allows us to know that somebody will use what we produced.
In the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, the public domain was still a vibrant thing. Many books that weren’t even 15 years old, and still fresh in the memories of the people who read them when they originally came out, returned to the public domain. Works from the public domain were in effect part of the public discourse. Estimates I’ve read say that about half of all works ever published were in the public domain at the time! It’s not difficult to imagine that these works were transformed in all kinds of ways: books turning into movies, movies spinning off music, and so on.
But the 1886 Berne Convention would destroy all that. From then on, books would only return to the public domain long after the people who were familiar with them had died. The public domain would become what it is now, the cold crypt where the classics reside, only to be visited by extremely bored high-school pupils, and the occasional author out-smarting his competitors.
That’s something that has always irritated me; these works rightfully belong to the public, but it is being made increasingly difficult for the public to interact with them. If we want the public to realize AGAIN what they own, we have to bring them in contact with the public domain. And the best way, I imagine, to do that is by once again transforming the works in the public domain for modern markets.
That is what I was trying to do when I joined Project Gutenberg. In 2002 I had started translating a number of Sherlock Holmes stories to Dutch, and I was looking for old fonts, so that I could set my translations in the original type. The Project Gutenberg website seemed like a good place to look for these old fonts. Well, the website didn’t have any book scans from which I could extract fonts, but it did have a link to Distributed Proofreaders, which was one of the few projects back then that actually DID have a lot of scans of book pages.
Distributed Proofreaders is addictive, and I never did finish my translations. What’s more, Distributed Proofreaders transforms page scans into more easily accessible computer text. When LibriVox came along, it offered me another way to help transform the public domain, and make it accessible to a larger audience, and I decide to jump in with The Secret Agent.
Boy! What a boring text! I had enjoyed Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, even though we were forced to read it in high-school, so I had hoped that The Secret Agent would be just as good. Perhaps it’s the difference between reading and reading aloud; or perhaps The Secret Agent really has adverb-packed sentences that go on forever and induce sleep in the poor soul who has to read them. The upshot was that I had to start OVER, three times, as you can well hear when listening to chapter five.
I always hoped that somebody would record over my effort. Luckily, at least for my ego, somebody complimented me on my reading the other day, or otherwise I would have spent the rest of my life thinking what a stinker I had produced. Unfortunately, the text did nothing, though, to keep me at LibriVox. I found this whole reading-thing hard going. So The Secret Agent was the first and also the last book I helped read for Librivox. I do return from time to time to the forums, hoping to find out that any Dutch books are being read that I might join in on.
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