LibriVox

209 bookofjoe 52 6/1/2025, 9:02:58 PM librivox.org ↗

Comments (52)

spookie · 5h ago

I really appreciate the existence of this project and all people who have contributed to it.

I want to contribute a reading of a book someday in my native tongue, as it is slowly dying (less than 1k speakers). A way of preserving it.

rendall · 4h ago

What is it?

No comments yet

theschmed · 10h ago

Another site, which includes a smaller but more professionally curated set of recordings, is Lit2Go (https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/books/). My children and I for example have greatly enjoyed Lorraine Montgomery’s recording of “Curly and Floppy Twistytail”, a series of delightful nonsense stories performed with gusto. (https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/183/curly-and-floppy-twistytail-t...) They’re not all aimed at children either, high quality recordings of Dracula, David Copperfield, etc

Min0taur · 5h ago

Ohhh, I never thought I'd see FCIT/lit2go mentioned on HN! I used to work in the sound booth for lit2Go, it was one of my favorite jobs. We had some wonderful vocal talent come through, and I learned much of what I know about recording/mixing from that work.The people in charge of organizing that project were diligent/earnest to the point of sainthood.

They have quite a few historic stereo-views scattered around their open source pic site, I always enjoyed browsing those with my 3d shades on:

https://etc.usf.edu/clippix/search?q=stereoview (They had more than this search would suggest; hopefully they're still around...)

WillAdams · 15h ago

One of my favourite novels, H. Beam Piper's _Little Fuzzy_ is in the public domain (because he died intestate and the Commonwealth of Pa. failed to renew his copyrights before they were turned over to his estate).

There is a professional-quality reading of it by Tabithat:

https://librivox.org/little-fuzzy-by-h-beam-piper/

which I recommend highly.

Unfortunately, the quality of the readings can vary widely, and my family has often been unwilling to put up with a poor quality recording on long trips.

That said, I use their app on my phone while doing boring tasks at work, and greatly appreciate the project.

rectangleboy · 11h ago

> Unfortunately, the quality of the readings can vary widely . . . I tried LibriVox in college to listen to difficult-to-understand poems (at the professor's recommendation) on my iPod and my ears couldn't take the harsh plosives that nearly every recording I tried had.

WillAdams · 11h ago

There is a collection of different authors reading Coleridge's "Kublai Khan" which is a great way to get an experience of a lot of different readers and possibly find one you like.

For my part, I'm grateful that folks volunteer their time and energy, and when there is only one reader for a given text, accept it.

Der_Einzige · 11h ago

It really is the e-book version of trying to do "netflix n chill" with FOSS.

It's sad that the best tech projects are not useful to normies.

nl · 9h ago

I don't think "netflix n chill" means what you think it does.

linsomniac · 4h ago

If you're one of today's lucky 10,000: It is slang for having sex, beyond the literal meaning.

Der_Einzige · 2h ago

It means what I think it means.

Do you think a girl wants to deal with you trying to get your torrent streaming system working with your TV? Hell no!

begemotz · 15h ago

"This is a libravox recording. All libravox recordings are in the public domain..."

I contributed to a Robert Lynd project on libravox many years ago, and I still remember saying these intros.

(Lynd was a wonderful essayist, if anyone might be interested).

jfengel · 15h ago

I know th books are always in the public domain. Are the recordings public domain as well, or are they under a free license like GPL?

harrisi · 15h ago

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

https://librivox.org/pages/about-librivox/

waltbosz · 15h ago

https://librivox.org/the-adventures-of-sherlock-holmes-versi...

David Clarke does a very good narration of many Sherlock Holmes stories.

bArray · 1h ago

I think there needs to be a way to apply multiple filters, i.e. I want Science Fiction and to listen in English. It would be good to also be able to combine with keywords too.

Deprogrammer9 · 7h ago

https://librivox.org/anarchy-by-errico-malatesta/

this is the way.

Moosdijk · 17h ago

I wonder if AI will be a benefit or a detriment to this project.

On the one hand, there’s going to be a lot more, potentially high quality audio books in its repository, on the other hand it goes against the spirit of the project itself.

woodson · 16h ago

The speech data collected by this project has been used for more than a decade to build automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis systems (see LibriSpeech, LibriTTS, LJSpeech). It definitely has been a benefit to AI.

joshstrange · 12h ago

I think they are talking more about the impact of AI on Librivox, as in people running an ebook through an AI TTS tool and uploading it.

On one hand, a well curated/edited AI recording might be great but a lot of people will (try? Idk their policies) to upload AI slop (no proof-listen, no checking, just laziness).

woodson · 10h ago

I think that, for the purposes of creating high-quality Free audiobooks, the issues are essentially the same with human-generated recordings as with AI generated ones. The recording quality and faithfulness to the original text (both in terms of “content” and the appropriate reading in terms of tone, expression of emotion, etc.) have to be verified. The problem is scale. There will be many more TTS-generated recordings uploaded than human-generated ones. Some automated filters (e.g., ASR WER, audio quality metrics) would be a great first step to discard bad-quality slop right away (though it might unfairly penalize real human accented speech).

Importantly, the recording should indicate whether it was human or AI generated.

username223 · 9h ago

> Importantly, the recording should indicate whether it was human or AI generated.

This is all that's necessary. Sometimes I'm fine with mediocre TTS; sometimes I want an actual professional; librivox is somewhere in between, but should clearly specify whether I will be getting an amateur human or a robot.

kristopolous · 8h ago

I imagine there's various disabilities where audio readings greatly simplify people's lives. They're probably appreciative of anything accurate regardless of whether it's humans talking or not.

spudlyo · 15h ago

I'd like to think that in the future this will be possible, but at present I believe there are still too many uncanny valley problems for me to regard any TTS generated audio books as high quality. I can sometimes tolerate listening to articles or technical essays done this way, but quality audio book narrators often do consistent and distinct character voices, understand complex emotional states, and are capable of reacting to contextual clues and subtext. This seems like a pretty high bar for current TTS models.

Something like NotebookLLM seems shockingly good at first, and gives me hope that eventually we'll have machines that are nearly as good as humans at this; but after listening to it for an hour or so the novelty wore off and the artifice of it now seems galling and distracting.

bookofjoe · 3h ago

>quality audio book narrators often do consistent and distinct character voices, understand complex emotional states, and are capable of reacting to contextual clues and subtext.

The best experience I've ever had with audio books is John le Carré reading his early novels (not in public domain). He uses a different voice for each character and they are SO pulsing with life it's breathtaking.

spudlyo · 1h ago

Thanks for the tip! I love well narrated audiobooks, and I've been meaning to get into one of le Carré's books for a while. I see he narrates the "John le Carré Value Collection" on Audible which has Tailor of Panama, Our Game, and Night Manager for a single credit. Is that what you're referring to?

Along those lines, there is a great 2007 unabridged audiobook[0] of Frank Herbert's Dune that is read by Simon Vance for narration, but other characters are dramatically performed by other voice actors. It's excellent, but sadly a tad bit uneven and inconsistent in production. It's like they got 3/4ths of the way through the project and some of the original voice actors couldn't complete the project and Vance had to pick up the slack. Regardless, it's still one of my favorite audiobooks.

[0]: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781427201447-dune

bookofjoe · 38m ago

My favorites are his first books read by him:

"Call For The Dead" and "A Small Town in Germany"

Listen here:

https://youtu.be/e1lmpG3kCDg

https://youtu.be/30QOqAcY4bY

https://youtu.be/0Ik9Gv9s0TQ

https://youtu.be/q79SspzdpLA

https://youtu.be/i3UnPBMouwU

FWIW The three novels in the "Value Collection" are abridged:

https://www.amazon.com/John-le-Carr-Value-Collection-audiobo...

UmYeahNo · 16h ago

Well, you can safely assume that everything in Librivox was used to train the AI. So, "benefit" or "detriment"... you make the call.

dlcarrier · 16h ago

I once couldn't find the audiobook of a book that my book club was reading, and it was a long book at I didn't have time to set aside to solely reading. It turned out that there weren't any commercially produced audiobooks of it, but it was public domain, and I found it on LibriVox.

The book was long and boring, but at least the narrating was good.

abawany · 13h ago

FWIW they now accept donations via the Internet Archive: https://wiki.librivox.org/index.php?title=Donate .

SubGenius · 17h ago

I've enjoyed quite a few very well narrated audiobooks on LibriVox. The Jane Austen novels voiced by Karen Savage are phenomenal.

Nopoint2 · 1h ago

Elizabeth Klett is good too.

towledev · 16h ago

Haven't listened to Librivox in years and years, but I still fork over the annual $2.99 because I feel I owe it.

It's horizon-broadening. Lots and lots of interesting reads/listens I never would've picked up otherwise. 1800s ghost stories, darkly racist novels like The Leopard's Spots (good luck getting through the first 10 pages). My favorite is Havelock the Dane: A Tale of Old Grimsby, first written circa the 14th century but thought to be much older. When you listen to it, it is apparent that the author and the intended audience know 100x more about nautical things than you do. It's also charmingly simplistic; the main character is sort of like Conan the Barbarian. He'll do things like "lift a stone the weight of an ox and throw it the length of two men." You imagine the audience being like, "Oh my fucking god.... that's amazing."

photochemsyn · 13h ago

A real gem is the Adrian Praetzellis reading of Kim by Rudyard Kipling:

https://librivox.org/kim-by-rudyard-kipling/

miki123211 · 7h ago

I wonder if we could make LibriVox, but with Eleven Labs.

Sure, Eleven Labs isn't anywhere near as good as professional narration (yet), but it's better than your average Librivox reader for sure.

At this point, it's just a matter of throwing money at the problem (and not that much money at that), and that's usually easier than finding talent.

parkersweb · 7h ago

I think Eleven Labs has essentially done that already with ElevenReader haven’t they?

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LibriVox

Comments (52)