20,858 Public Domain Audio Books

54 pointsposted 13 hours ago
by smooke
(librivox.org)

5 Comments

freedomben

5 hours ago

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?

delichon

4 hours ago

I think we're at least near the point where it's better to get the text and feed it to an AI reader app, that can be customized in various dimensions, like actor(s) and pace.

I have some favorite audio book narrators, like Patrick Tull, Stephan Fry and Stefan Rudnicki. Sure I'd rather have them read for me, but I'm not going to be able to afford that. I maybe could afford for their licensed AI mimic to read it, and that is an improvement over many random amateur contributors. With AI "personalities" it may become as simple as "have personality X read me text file Y, moderato".

Also it would be great to be able to conversationally control the narration. "Pause, hey what does that big word mean, go back two sentences and restart, stop, who is this Watson guy?, ok keep reading but adagio."

disambiguation

4 hours ago

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.

Podrod

4 hours ago

On kindles you can highlight passages and there's an option to see the most highlighted passages. Not quite the same as notes but a bit similar. I find it annoying and have it disabled however.

Bender

12 hours ago

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.