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Thursday Jan 10, 2008
Volunteering for the public domain
I'm always interested to see how volunteering is the motor behind making the internet a really valuable educational resource for all. Wikipedia is probably the preeminent example of this, however Librivox is another amazing example of this phenomenon of volunteering for the benefit of greater online knowledge."LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books."
LibriVox was started in August 2005, by Hugh McGuire, a Montreal-based writer and web developer. More about him can be found at hughmcguire.net. Apparently LibriVox was inspired by AKMA's audio volunteer project amongst other projects.
As only books in the public domain can be read for Librivox, it means practically that mostly books published before 1923 are potential audio books. If you are an audio book junkie, you'll be amazed by how many books they have already- over a 1000 books on there for download. Librivox's growth is pretty phenomenal and has become one of the most productive publishers of audio books out there.
Apart from the volunteering element, what I think is ingenious about the project is its use of collaboration and partnership- the trump card for not for profits if managed well. In Librivox's case they partner with Project Gutenberg who have online text files of books in the public domain, and the Internet Archive and ibiblio.org who host the audio files for free that Librivox volunteers produce.
If you interested in volunteering for Librivox you can find more information here. Posted by Patrick Daniels ( 3:59 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
