I had a conversation about Project Gutenberg, the free repository of free (as in liberty) books that have entered the public domain. These books are no longer under copyright, which means that anyone can copy them and distribute them to the general public.
I proceeded to write a post about how great it would be if there were a human-read audiobook version of Gutenberg.
Then, while I was browsing the Gutenberg site again, I noticed that there was already a section of human-read audiobooks. Nice. Kind of disappointing to see that there are only 31 human-read books on the site. There are 369 computer-generated audiobooks, but I worry that the computer’s reading would lack the tone and inflection needed to make them really compelling stories.
There are a number of options for getting audiobooks online. AudioBooksForFree has a large and growing list. Audiobooks.org has links to publishers. There are scattered assortments of sites with free offerings, but this area is clearly missing a category-killer that has one stop shopping and a dedicated community. I’d like to see the Wikimedia Foundation put up something like this, but who knows. The most important part would really be a site that insists on Creative Commons-licensed works. Maybe I should just throw it up on my currently abandoned wiki.
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