This is really cool. Do they by chance offer a rate limited rsync access to archive everything? Asking in the event my small community gets cut off during an economic collapse. If so I would also set up a public rsync mirror.
I had a similar desire but wasn't able to find anything through Librivox directly. Not everything is up there (at least when I was checking), but I ended up going through archive.org for a number of big collections using the torrent option. I've been seeding some of those torrents now for years and they get very little traffic so I have no problem keeping them up indefinitely.
Not to be that guy but if your community gets cut off from the Internet in an economic collapse maybe audiobooks of public domain works are not super important
Just like in the movie Book of Eli [1] I will keep everyone's MP3 players charged. They can also come over and listen to solar powered Bluetooth speakers and their music, books, whatever. Maybe some children's books for the kiddos to keep some level of normalcy. This may be even more important should we go from economic collapse to societal collapse.
I appreciate you being that guy as I am often also that guy. We should form a club.
I really love librivox for what they've done and their mission, so please don't interpret this as a criticism. It simply is what it is, and I appreciate all the effort people have graciously donated to make life better and information more accessible for their fellow humans.
That said, the vast majority of the recordings from Librivox I've listened to are pretty bad. There are some narrators that are decent, but many are borderline unlistenable. For those, an AI voice narrator would be much better, even with the current state of TTS. Is anybody working on an effort to produce these works with an AI voice?
Semi off topic, but i always thought it would be cool if there was a kind of multiplayer for ebooks - threads and notes in the margins similar to how dark souls lets you write brief hints for other players that you can hide around the game world.
Its impractical due to the technical and legal challenges, but it would be neat to see the thoughts of other readers page by page.
I thought you were going to say multiplayer for audiobooks. Different people could read for different characters and the listener could choose which voice they wanted to read for which parts.
Lots of audio recordings have a "background" that would be jarring to jump between, and getting those backgrounds identical is actually hard work for professionals.
I find remote interview-format podcasts sometimes hard to listen to because the audio quality jumps around so much, with background hisses appearing and disappearing.
10 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 27.3 ms ] threadI appreciate you being that guy as I am often also that guy. We should form a club.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Eli
That said, the vast majority of the recordings from Librivox I've listened to are pretty bad. There are some narrators that are decent, but many are borderline unlistenable. For those, an AI voice narrator would be much better, even with the current state of TTS. Is anybody working on an effort to produce these works with an AI voice?
Its impractical due to the technical and legal challenges, but it would be neat to see the thoughts of other readers page by page.
I find remote interview-format podcasts sometimes hard to listen to because the audio quality jumps around so much, with background hisses appearing and disappearing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45657083
Crossover is that some of what we’ve done is curate some of the best librivox titles and enhance their audio quality.