Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Free public domain audiobooks

librivox.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 67 posts

Re: Free public domain audiobooks

#51

Post by oska »

hcrisp wrote: post #39
umvi wrote: post #2

I listened to Treasure Island[0] on librivox and was impressed with the quality of the voice actor (Adrian Praetzellis). Beware though, some books are fragmented and performed by N different voice actors/actresses which can be jarring. [0] https://librivox.org/treasure-island-by-robert-louis-stevens...

Another excellent narrator with a British accent is Karen Savage. She has read many complete works by Jane Austen and E. Nesbit, among other titles, and is as good as any professional voice actor: - 'Pride and Prejudice' (Austen) - 'Sense and Sensibility' (Austen) - 'The Story of the Treasure Seekers' (Nesbit) - 'The Railway Children' (Nesbit) - many others (says 141 total matches) http://www.karenrsavage.com/blog/

Direct link listing her books on librivox:

https://librivox.org/reader/103?primary_key=103&search_categ...

Re: Free public domain audiobooks

#52

Post by deepspace »

This is a great resource for classical works, but to me, it emphasizes what a damn shame it is that copyright terms are so long. In my mind, a copyright term of, say, 25 years is reasonable, and more than long enough to compensate authors for their work. Imagine if we had free access to works written in the 80s and 90s, rather than the 1800s.

Re: Free public domain audiobooks

#53

Post by Dig1t »

Not really related to this site but I have been dying for a version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books different than the ones on Audible. All the books other than the first one are read by someone who gives Zaphod a New Yorker style accent which totally kills the character, and thus the books, for me.

Re: Free public domain audiobooks

#54

Post by meristohm »

JZL003 wrote: post #5

For a technical audience, I would look at some TTS (text to speech) programs especially by google and IBM. It's definitely robotic and nothing like a nice narrator but audiobooks are amazing regardless. And your mind actually starts filling in the emotional blanks. It can also be really cool to use like internet archive's scanned book's OCR -> TTS and make an audiobook from a cool old book that would never be profess…

Thanks for promoting TTS. I’ve listened to many books, fiction and non-, on Android using Google TTS and it felt like half-baked masa cakes; good enough to eat, but even better once fully cooked. One of the ebook readers I used (available on F-Droid, included pitch change) allowed for custom spellings of strings, though “sat” being read as “Saturday”, and “Dr” as “drive”, were difficult to fix so I relied on context. On iOS I’m happy to learn about Speech Options from a child comment.

Re: Free public domain audiobooks

#55

Post by vmilner »

hcrisp wrote: post #39
umvi wrote: post #2

I listened to Treasure Island[0] on librivox and was impressed with the quality of the voice actor (Adrian Praetzellis). Beware though, some books are fragmented and performed by N different voice actors/actresses which can be jarring. [0] https://librivox.org/treasure-island-by-robert-louis-stevens...

Another excellent narrator with a British accent is Karen Savage. She has read many complete works by Jane Austen and E. Nesbit, among other titles, and is as good as any professional voice actor: - 'Pride and Prejudice' (Austen) - 'Sense and Sensibility' (Austen) - 'The Story of the Treasure Seekers' (Nesbit) - 'The Railway Children' (Nesbit) - many others (says 141 total matches) http://www.karenrsavage.com/blog/

You can tell she's good because her books are copied and sold on Audible.

Re: Free public domain audiobooks

#56

Post by zibzab »

worldofmatthew wrote: post #15

I have been working on remastering some audiobooks from there, once I got more books done, I will have a proper section for people to download them for free from my website (direct links from the listing, no bs). Remastering as in removing background noise, EQing, compression and normalization of audio levels and reducing the librivox intro to the start of the audiobook only, rather than annoying people every chapter…

You should publish how you do it to help others.

The community has the manpower but now always the knowledge

Re: Free public domain audiobooks

#58

Post by type0 »

worldofmatthew wrote: post #15

I have been working on remastering some audiobooks from there, once I got more books done, I will have a proper section for people to download them for free from my website (direct links from the listing, no bs). Remastering as in removing background noise, EQing, compression and normalization of audio levels and reducing the librivox intro to the start of the audiobook only, rather than annoying people every chapter…

Thank you, that's desperately needed.

Re: Free public domain audiobooks

#59

Post by benkaiser »

I've been working on something similar to this specifically for crowd-sourcing readings of the Bible available here: https://thereadbible.com/

It's super MVP and currently uses youtube for the recordings, but it works and is entirely hosted on GitHub Pages (including user-submitted data that runs through a github action).

Re: Free public domain audiobooks

#60

Post by Breza »

benkaiser wrote: post #59

I've been working on something similar to this specifically for crowd-sourcing readings of the Bible available here: https://thereadbible.com/ It's super MVP and currently uses youtube for the recordings, but it works and is entirely hosted on GitHub Pages (including user-submitted data that runs through a github action).

This is a really cool project!
Post reply on HN