LibriVox: Free Public Domain Audiobooks

by drummer • 6 years ago

286 81 6 years ago

seven42• 6 years ago

LibriVox 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• 6 years ago

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.

seven42• 6 years ago

Thanks - 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.

zzo38computer4• 6 years ago

I 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_reala2• 6 years ago

It’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

robin_reala2• 6 years ago

(I misremembered, it’s actually 100 years in Mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright... )

bueno3• 6 years ago

I 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/id10417...

drummer• 6 years ago

Their about page says that Archive.org hosts their audio files for free.

elektor• 6 years ago

Bound was the best $4 I’ve spent on an app, thanks Tim.

bueno3• 6 years ago

Wow! Thank you for the compliment. I really appreciate it.

squillful• 6 years ago

Came here to say the same thing. Awesome app. Great to be freed from the shackles of Audible and the likes :)

ziftface2• 6 years ago

Your app looks very interesting, thanks for sharing.

Kind of off topic, but is it possible to sync your current time with a cloud provider using this app?

bueno3• 6 years ago

At this time no. Audiobooks and their current progress are local to the device.

This is a fairly complicated feature to implement and I haven’t had a chance to do it yet.

mxcrossb• 6 years ago

It seems like there are a lot of LibriVox items available as podcasts on iTunes. Maybe there are similar feeds you can use.

hombre_fatal2• 6 years ago

One of the first 100% SwiftUI apps I made to practice it was to build a librivox client.

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.

hombre_fatal2• 6 years ago

Oh, this is a completely different entity.

Seems a bit hostile to sweep up the branding of librivox like that.

parkersweb• 6 years ago

Looks great - but the App Store says it requires iOS13. iPhone 6 user so I’m stuck on iOS12 - I couldn’t see from the release notes when that change came in?

sodium83• 6 years ago

Your app is awesome. I use it every day. I really like the smooth streamlined interface. Thanks for your effort.

rrrrobi• 6 years ago

I’ve been using Bound for a couple years and I absolutely love it.

AHASIC• 6 years ago

I find their categorization amusing as this is there:

Non-fiction > Bibles > American Standard Version

aesh2Xa1• 6 years ago

Probably, 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• 6 years ago

FWIW, the Dewey Decimal system also classifies myths and religious texts separate from works of fiction. And the two are classified separately.

gbear605• 6 years ago

The 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• 6 years ago

Could audiobooks be used to train neural networks?

hamsta• 6 years ago

The 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.pd... and https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.02882

AnonC• 6 years ago

With 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• 6 years ago

The 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.

X6S1x6Okd1st2• 6 years ago

It 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

reallydontask• 6 years ago

Or is it just a matter of “download, listen and see if it’s good enough or move on”?

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.

JadeNB3• 6 years ago

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 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.

dancek• 6 years ago

That's true, but I don't think it's a huge problem. Listening to an audiobook typically takes at least five hours. Usually you can tell whether you're happy with the narration within a couple of minutes.

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.

COGlory• 6 years ago

There are reviews in the Android app, which is what I usually listen to.

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.

danielbarla• 6 years ago

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”?

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.)

blindluke• 6 years ago

All valid points, and I did spend quite a bit of time finding the narrators I like.

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.

JadeNB3• 6 years ago

I knew I was listening to a lot of audiobooks when I started having strong opinions about favoured and disfavoured narrators. NYT recently profiled Eduoardo Ballerini as a kind of "voice of God", but, for me, that's John Man. What Don LaFontaine is to movie trailers, John Man is for audiobooks, at least to me.

andrepd• 6 years ago

Why are commercial audiobooks automatically higher quality while LibreVox is "a dump" of audiobooks? For what's worth I listened to about half a dozen audiobooks off LibreVox and the quality has ranged from good to superb.

zzo38computer4• 6 years ago

While 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• 6 years ago

With regard to pronunciation, this is often what separates a quality reader from a poor one.

nightowl_games• 6 years ago

I 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• 6 years ago

There is a similar project for german audiobooks: https://www.vorleser.net/

KangLi• 6 years ago

Librivox rocks dude. I volunteered and must await verification :D

hoka• 6 years ago

Highly 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• 6 years ago

You compensated the owner of a chain of coffee shops by buying a few mugs?

tomerbd2• 6 years ago

I 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• 6 years ago

Which is your preferred TTS engine or product for this purpose?

tomerbd2• 6 years ago

I 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/ I use british english, female voice, Amy - perfect.

vmilner• 6 years ago

Because 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• 6 years ago

A 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?

dcminter2• 6 years ago

My 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• 6 years ago

See 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• 6 years ago

Your father's reading of of Oedipus Rex is superb.

Please accept my thanks.

dcminter2• 6 years ago

I 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?

reedwolf4• 6 years ago

There 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

lopis• 6 years ago

That is seriously amazing. Thanks for sharing!

kilroy123• 6 years ago

Good bot

chooseaname2• 6 years ago

Woah! This is great! Thanks so much.

seesawtron2• 6 years ago

Cool stuff. Is this open sourced so one can modify it to search for specfic genres of books or specific authors? Cheer!

reedwolf4• 6 years ago

Sure. 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-b...

louniks4• 6 years ago

Hey, 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/

mushufasa• 6 years ago

Ah, 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?

louniks4• 6 years ago

If 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.

eXpl0it3r2• 6 years ago

While checking out the project on GitHub I noticed that you're using GerritHub for reviews and made me wonder whether this is holding back some people from contributing. Not that it's bad in anyway, but I assume it's something a lot of people are unfamiliar with and the description of how to use it for the project is very limited, plus work in progress isn't directly visible as PR on GitHub.

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?

louniks4• 6 years ago

I'm not married to Gerrit, and I concede that it could be a hurdle. It's what I use for my day job, so I chose it out of laziness and familiarity more than anything else. I'll probably drop it, and learn the GitHub PR tools and workflow - I've gotten a few random PRs already.

Edit: I'll talk to the volunteers about making that Google doc public, good suggestion.

mobilio• 6 years ago

Even WordPress theme is little bit outdated...

DLarsen• 6 years ago

If you enjoy Mark Twain, the John Greenman readings (https://librivox.org/reader/107) are fantastic.

softsound• 6 years ago

I 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.

LibriVox: Free Public Domain Audiobooks

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