LibriVox: Free Public Domain Audiobooks
librivox.org
librivox.org
I have a day job and two kids, the amount of time and energy I give to LibriVox is sufficient to keep the lights on, but not much else.
We don't have money, in fact we don't even have a legal entity, any donations we get are handled by Internet Archive, who also kindly provide us our two servers (yes, only two).
If you want to help and know PHP and CodeIgniter, we'd be very happy to have you on board! While I am a developper, it's currently Python, and not at all web related. LibriVox's tech sack has fallen woefully out of date (PH 5.6, CodeIgniter 2), and I can't bring it up to date all by my self.
I'll be honest, it's not glamorous work. There's no automated testing, anything we change has to be tested and validated by the volunteers themselves - who are awesome, by the way. But we're a fantastic little nugget of Internet, and I think we should stick around on a solid tech stack for as long as possible ;)
All of our code is on GitHub: https://github.com/LibriVox/
I also am using python for work, not PHP. Does LibriVox plan to continue maintaining the current PHP codebase via a major version upgrade, or are you hoping to just do a rewrite in a more easily maintainable manner?
Also keep in mind - a good chunk of the volunteers aren't tech-savvy, and are nervous when faced with changes. Just upgrading to a new phpBB version, with a new theme, was met with some grumbles.
I realize I'm a horrible salesman, but something about LibriVox just keeps me involved. I don't even participate in the audiobooks aspect of it, just tech. I was initially brought on as a paid sysadmin as part of that project to modernize our code that took that full-time developer months. When that ended, I stuck around as a volunteer.
Additionally, you mention in the CONTRIBUTING.md that there's a Google doc with a lot of issues listed that should be converted to GitHub issues. Where does one find that Google doc?
Edit: I'll talk to the volunteers about making that Google doc public, good suggestion.
Cool, I wouldn't mind copying/creating a bunch of issues on the side.
https://github.com/LibriVox/librivox-catalog/blob/master/CON...
Have fun, and many thanks!
(I'll try to make time this weekend to drop GerritHub as well, and convert what I currently have there to PRs)
In fact in the last conversation I had with him, he said to tell the people on the LibriVox forums "Cheerio" from him, so he had certainly enjoyed being part of that community.
After he died and I posted his farewell message there, it was quite emotional reading through the tributes to him and his skill as a storyteller. Later still I found a dozen or so "fan mail" letters - so he knew he was appreciated.
I'll always be grateful to LibriVox for giving him an avenue to exercise a talent that wouldn't otherwise have been public.
But then you go on to realise it’s a resource that people have poured themselves into. I love it
Please accept my thanks.
I made a Reddit bot [0] that continually scans comments across the entire site for mentions of science fiction and fantasy book titles. It uses a dataset of book title/author pairs that were scraped from the Speculative Fiction Database, a compendium of all known science fiction/fantasy literary works.
If an SFF book title/author pair is detected in a comment, the bot searches YouTube for an audiobook of the mentioned title, then replies with a link to it should one be found.
Please note that I'm a beginner programmer, so the code probably looks really ugly to professional devs. I plan on refactoring the code once I get more advanced in programming.
[0] https://capybasilisk.com/posts/2020/04/speculative-fiction-b...
One question: How does the locally run python script feedback the scraped data to bot user account app?
If anyone wants to check out my app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bound-audiobook-player/id10417...
I feel like amazon literally hasn't bothered updating their UI since the 90s. I love audible, but god damn their UI is depressing and actually makes listening to audiobooks a worse experience. There's no better alternative either :(
Kind of off topic, but is it possible to sync your current time with a cloud provider using this app?
This is a fairly complicated feature to implement and I haven’t had a chance to do it yet.
Download the librivox iPhone client and use mitmproxy to see the endpoints it hits.
Oh yeah, looks like it hits https://librivox.app 's api (not the .org). Don't remember if there was/wasn't a relationship between the services. For all I know it's a full 3rd party content mirror.
Seems a bit hostile to sweep up the branding of librivox like that.
With the above context, how is a dump of audiobooks like this useful to the masses without reviews from people who have listened to the works? The lack of reviews here is not a problem as much as the lack of a reviewing or commenting interface would be, IMO.
How do the current listeners (on HN) of works here decide what to download or not? Or is it just a matter of “download, listen and see if it’s good enough or move on”?
Otherwise, uh, it’s free. Take a listen, if it works, keep it. If not, drop it. Conundrum solved.
I love audiobooks, but honestly don't see an easy way to interface with this site
Then just don't use it at all. Go buy a sub to Audible.
Pretty much.
It can be pretty annoying when a book has multiple narrators as the quality can vary significantly, so you might get deep into a book before you start getting consistently bad narrators.
I can't remember the book now, but it put me off using LibriVox forever.
Now I try the local library app or the app from the local library where I used to live and if that fails there is always audible.
I think one of the most annoying experiences I had was when they changed narrators in the third book of the Takeshi Kovacs series. It wasn't even that the third narrator was bad, especially, just that he sounded wrong—but I was far too invested to set it aside at that point.
While you say "a dump of audiobooks", it is certainly not that for the readers who put in a considerable amount of work for each and every title. And it is certainly not that for the listeners who can listen to books not otherwise available.
I don't think reading or listening to books at random (or based on average community score) makes sense. If you pick books based on trustworthy recommendations, most problems go away. Then just see where that book is available; if it is on Librivox and it's good enough, great. If not, get a commercial edition or a hard copy.
I've only listened to a single audiobook from Librivox. It was a book that has no commercial counterpart. The quality was mediocre but I was really happy to be able to listen to that specific book. On the other hand, I had to stop listening to another commercially produced book (that I also wanted to listen to) because I couldn't stand the narrator, so I do see your point of view.
Narration is a personal preference, but I've found many of the narrations are pretty good. Even compared to paid ones.
I work in a laboratory where I can go hours without the ability to even touch my phone to turn something on or off, or change volumes. So far, I've only been terminally annoyed to the point I turned it off, despite wearing acid contaminated gloves. For me, that's a pretty good track record.
Pretty much download, listen, move on. But after a few, you might start recognising the reader, and have confidence in them. (It's been a while for me since I made heavy use of Librivox, so I've forgotten the ones I preferred.)
If you want a place to start, I can recommend the recordings by Mark Nelson - https://librivox.org/reader/251
He recorded a lot of pulp classics - "The Cosmic Computer", "First Lensman", "Hour of the Dragon", "Princess of Mars", "Space Viking". Professional quality recording, great voice, charming books.
Is there any easy-access repository that goes over the copyright patchwork for different works around the world? I yearn for the day when we have a more global schema for copyright/distribution rights.
As someone who travels frequently - it does my head in when a subscription content provider geo-blocks something I'm accessing.
Even if you have general guidance across the varying nations, most of the time you can't expect it to be compatible. In fact, I've run across differing and incompatible copyrights across states within the same nation. I've seen copyright laws that contradict themselves, and the courts reinterpreting that law in seemingly random ways, so understanding the law isn't a guarantee that you can obey it.
As things currently stand even determining who holds a copyright may not always be possible, and the person who holds the copyright may not be aware that they do.
Even just the concept of Public Domain does not exist in all countries, and does not mean the same thing across most countries - there are subtle differences that can lead to insane incompatibilities.
Distribution rights, whilst complicated, are far less complex than the tangled web that is copyright law.
(If so, I would request that you make the recordings public domain and Opus format, although this is not required.)
He also runs a chain of Houston coffee shops; their mugs sit proudly in my cabinet! Felt great to compensate someone for many many hours of public good.
But, some things I don't know. How to deal with footnotes? What if some of the footnotes are unreferenced (like in a story I wrote)? What if the text has some word/name that they do not know how to pronounce? (What if the author also doesn't know, or if the author knew but is now dead or for some other reason can no longer speak (and didn't write down the pronounciation)?) What about foreign text? (In the story I mentioned, it is mostly in English, although there is one passage written in Latin.)
Non-fiction > Bibles > American Standard Version
1) historians/theologians reviewing a literal translation 2) believers of the faith
That said, I agree that the rest of us thinks it's a story. Maybe magical realism would be close enough?
(Anyways, the Bible is a collection of texts of various kinds. It isn't really a work of fiction in the way that most stories are, and even the texts they have are not entirely fictitious anyways; some parts might be historically accurate, some parts might be exaggerated, some parts might be lost, and some parts might be works of fiction, for example.)
On the other hand, if you group it by topic covered and style, the Bible gets sorted with history, which isn’t great but at least is reasonable. And then there’s also the category of religion that fits even better.
However, some books might fit into multiple categorizations, depending on the type of categorization. (As one example, one type of categorization is Dewey Decimal System, so if you select the Dewey category then the subcategories will be the numeric categories, but the same book might also be found in other categories based on a different categorization scheme.)