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LibriVox: Free Public Domain Audiobooks
- seven4 6y agoLibriVox recordings are Public Domain in the USA. If you are not in the USA, please verify the copyright status of these works in your own country before downloading, otherwise you may be violating copyright laws. 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.
- shakna 6y agoCopyright is ridiculously hard. Beyond difficult. 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.
- seven4 6y agoThanks - this more or less echos what i suspected but never really delved into. It is a touch disheartening - and I don't see who would be incentivised (or even capable of) clarifying/simplifying things.
- zzo38computer 6y agoI agree to put anything I write myself as public domain, so if it isn't a secret, then you can copy it if you want to. I don't like copyright. I don't know if you want to make audio recordings of the stuff I have written, but at least now you know, you are free to do so if you want to do. (If so, I would request that you make the recordings public domain and Opus format, although this is not required.)
- robin_reala 6y agoIt’s really problematic. For a specific example, let’s look at Barrie’s Peter and Wendy. It was published in 1911, so is well below the current 1925 barrier in the US. In most countries he falls into the 70-years-after-death PD boundary, and in Mexico with their 90-years-after-death it’s fast approaching the PD date. But in the UK there’s a specific exception built into law that it’ll never go into the public domain: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/301 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/301
- robin_reala 6y ago(I misremembered, it’s actually 100 years in Mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright... )
- bueno 6y agoI created and maintain an audiobook iPhone app, Bound. I’ve been meaning to integrate LibriVox as a source but the API leaves a lot to be desired. Has anyone had experience with this? It seems like I should just use Archive.org as the source instead. If anyone wants to check out my app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bound-audiobook-player/id1041727137 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bound-audiobook-player/id10417...
- drummer 6y agoTheir about page says that Archive.org hosts their audio files for free.
- elektor 6y agoBound was the best $4 I’ve spent on an app, thanks Tim.
- bueno 6y agoWow! Thank you for the compliment. I really appreciate it.
- askjdlkasdjsd 6y agoAs an android user, I'm so jelly. Those screenshots look delicious, well done. 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 :(
- AHASIC 6y agoI find their categorization amusing as this is there: Non-fiction > Bibles > American Standard Version
- aesh2Xa1 6y agoProbably, a satisfactory justification can be either or both of: 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?
- mordechai9000 6y agoFWIW, the Dewey Decimal system also classifies myths and religious texts separate from works of fiction. And the two are classified separately.
- zzo38computer 6y agoI suppose the Dewey Decimal System is a suitable reason to classify it as "non-fiction", but then presumably the Dewey Decimal numbers should be present (even if that is not the classification scheme of LibriVox, which is OK, I suppose). (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.)
- gbear605 6y agoThe problem is that if you’re categorizing by “what fraction of people think this is true,” you have to group the Bible with Darwin and antivaxxers. You can’t decree “we’re organizing by truthfulness” unless you’re okay with other people organizing with what they think is true. 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.
- MrTrvp 6y agoCould audiobooks be used to train neural networks?
- hamsta 6y agoThe audio files from LibriVox are commonly used to train neural networks for ASR and TTS, see e.g. https://www.danielpovey.com/files/2015_icassp_librispeech.pdf https://www.danielpovey.com/files/2015_icassp_librispeech.pd... and https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.02882 https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.02882
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- AnonC 6y agoWith public domain ebooks in text based formats, if desired, it’s easy for a distributor or for the end user to change the display fonts (and font attributes) to make it easier or more pleasant to read. For audiobooks, these factors — the voice of the narrator, the intonations and expressions, accent and more — matter to have a good listening experience. Even commercially published audiobooks are dissed on the basis of having a poor narrator. An audiobook player doesn’t have a lot to provide on these factors (with the current technology) compared to ebooks. 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”?
- nsomaru 6y agoThe LibriVox app on iOS has reviews. Otherwise, uh, it’s free. Take a listen, if it works, keep it. If not, drop it. Conundrum solved.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoIt has non-zero opportunity cost. The search for LibriVox seems to have no indication of the user rated quality of the recording and lists entries with no completed books. I love audiobooks, but honestly don't see an easy way to interface with this site
- chooseaname 6y ago> It has non-zero opportunity cost. Then just don't use it at all. Go buy a sub to Audible.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoFuck audible. I get most of my audiobooks from the public library
- zzo38computer 6y agoWhile I prefer text based formats myself, there can be the use for audio recordings of it, I think, such as people who prefer the audio recordings, or when it can be useful in different circumstances. 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.)
- entropicdrifter 6y agoWith regard to pronunciation, this is often what separates a quality reader from a poor one.
- nightowl_games 6y agoI found a bug. I'm on Firefox on Windows and when I open genres in new tabs, they dont open properly. The new tab just shows the top of the genres list, even though the url is full of information regarding which genre I clicked.
- sandreas 6y agoThere is a similar project for german audiobooks: https://www.vorleser.net/ https://www.vorleser.net/
- KangLi 6y agoLibrivox rocks dude. I volunteered and must await verification :D
- hoka 6y agoHighly recommend David Clarke's work, especially his Sherlock Holmes readings. For me, he's the best Sherlock narrator I've heard. 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.
- mapleoin 6y agoYou compensated the owner of a chain of coffee shops by buying a few mugs?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tomerbd 6y agoI prefer text to speech than LibriVox I listened to a few books, the only audio books I can listen with a narrator is when he is really professional otherwise TTS.
- alessivs 6y agoWhich is your preferred TTS engine or product for this purpose?
- tomerbd 6y agoI have a few years old phone which still has ivona on it, it's just perfect!! have a look at a sample - http://www.ttsforaccessibility.com/ http://www.ttsforaccessibility.com/ I use british english, female voice, Amy - perfect.
- vmilner 6y agoBecause of the public domain licensing, some LibriVox recordings are simply copied (with the LibriVox ID removed) and sold on Audible. (Search Audible for Karen Savage - e.g. Pride and Prejudice).
- bitxbit 6y agoA bit off topic but what’s the status on any research toward leveraging audiobooks to produce text-to-speech? What are the hurdles in making it seamless and imperceptible? And what’s the “theoretical” number of recorded words/hour required to produce something reasonable?
- dcminter 6y agoMy late father did a number of recordings for LibriVox. 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.
- corobo 6y agoSee this is why I love these sort of projects. Yes as a casual person just reading the nerd news it’s a useful resource But then you go on to realise it’s a resource that people have poured themselves into. I love it
- Ice_cream_suit 6y agoYour father's reading of of Oedipus Rex is superb. Please accept my thanks.
- dcminter 6y agoI thank you on his behalf. Most of his fan mail was for his reading of The Prisoner of Zenda, so perhaps try that if you haven't already and the genre is to your taste?
- reedwolf 6y agoThere are also a huge number of audiobooks available on YouTube. 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. [0] https://www.reddit.com/user/EmotionalField https://www.reddit.com/user/EmotionalField
- lopis 6y agoThat is seriously amazing. Thanks for sharing!
- kilroy123 6y agoGood bot
- chooseaname 6y agoWoah! This is great! Thanks so much.
- seesawtron 6y agoCool stuff. Is this open sourced so one can modify it to search for specfic genres of books or specific authors? Cheer!
- reedwolf 6y agoSure. The code's up on my site [0]. 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-bot/ https://capybasilisk.com/posts/2020/04/speculative-fiction-b...
- seesawtron 6y agoAwesome. Didn't know about reddit API wrapper praw! Thanks a ton, will give it a try. One question: How does the locally run python script feedback the scraped data to bot user account app?
- louniks 6y agoHey, so I'm the very part time volunteer sysadmin for LibriVox, can I use this opportunity to ask for help? 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/ https://github.com/LibriVox/
- mushufasa 6y agoAh, I was actually browsing the volunteer page just now looking for a github link to contribute code or at least html/css. 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?
- louniks 6y agoIf someone's willing to put in the time to redo our code in Python, I wouldn't be opposed to that. However, keep in mind that it'd be a massive undertaking. Last time we re-wrote our apps, it took a full-time developer multiple months. Admittedly, everything was brand new, and included collecting requirements and validating the prototypes with the volunteers. So perhaps a "simple" rewrite, keeping all the logic the same, wouldn't be so hard. 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.
- DLarsen 6y agoIf you enjoy Mark Twain, the John Greenman readings (https://librivox.org/reader/107 https://librivox.org/reader/107) are fantastic.
- softsound 6y agoI love librivox. Perfect for drawing too. I find the phone app easier to use then the website though. Perhaps I might help out when I get some freetime later.