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LibriVox

The In Touch program on Radio 4 recently had a feature on Audio books which you can download from the web. One of the websites mentioned was LibriVox, and its address is www.librivox.org.

LibriVox is a completely voluntary organisation which makes audio recordings of books which are in the public domain, and then makes them available for free. Since the web server which Librivox uses is in the USA, books are in the public domain if they were published in the USA before 1923. Their completely crazy aim is to record all the books in the public domain.

LibriVox was started in August 2005, and so the current catalogue is quite small — but there are lots more books in the pipeline. Some of the books are read by a single person, others have chapters read by different people. As you might expect, the quality of both the reading and the recording are very variable.

The recordings can be downloaded in a number of ways, including podcasts and bit torrents, if you're into that sort of thing. However, you can also go to their catalogue page, where you can download individual chapters in the mp3 format. For most books you can also download the entire book as a .zip file, which contains all the individual chapters. You can get to the catalogue page by pressing the catalogue button on the home page. This shows both the books that are currently available, and the books that are in the process of being recorded.

Once you've downloaded some mp3 files, you can play one just by double clicking it. Your default mp3 player will then open, and start playing the file. The default mp3 player will probably be Windows Media Player, but you can change this if you want.