"audio Book" Videos

Morris intends to give Miss Sloper up.

Morris intends to give Miss Sloper up.

Live opnames van Bos in Concert, een show met 21 van de populairste muziek uit zes voorstellingen van Theater het Amsterdamse Bos, gezongen en gespeeld door een speciaal samengesteld ensemble van oud-Bosspelers. Uitgegeven door Theater het Amsterdamse Bos (2009) Spreker(s): Margreet Boersbroek, Jan Paul Buijs, Carole van Ditzhuyzen, Sjaan Duinhoven, Eva van der Gucht, Lottie Hellingman, Elise Schaap, Anne Catrien Smits, Thomas Spijkerman

The Decameron. Send questions and comments to info@librivox.org

Please welcome Jeffrey Lynn Stoddard to the site. His book is The Eye of the Storm, and it starts releasing now: Dante Dre, a 38 year old single gay man, awakens one morning to a terrifying discovery that implicates him in a horrendous crime. But that s only the beginning. As the day progresses he soon discovers outside forces complicating matters even more and this leads to a night of sheer terror. The clock is ticking. Can he manage to stay alive long enough to find out what really happened and clear his name? Get the first five episodes all at once in the default feed, with more to come. Or if you would prefer, we ll make you a custom RSS feed that gets one new episode at a time on a schedule you pick until the serialized audiobook is complete.

Read by Kara Shallenberg and Michelle Crandall. Enjoy this reading? Let me know at http://kayray.org/category/audiobooks/

The audiobook of my latest novel, Makers has been published by Random House Audio, strictly in DRM-free formats over the net (this means that Apple won't carry it in the iTunes store, even though Audible was willing to carry it without DRM). The reading is by Bernadette Dunne, a very talented actor. I just listened to this for the first time yesterday and I was blown away by Dunne's reading. I'm a huge audiobook nut, and I'm incredibly glad to have professional audiobook adaptations of my books from Random House -- and doubly grateful to them for supporting my commitment to DRM-free distribution. When you buy this book, you own it. The "terms of service" are "Don't violate copyright law," not "By buying this audiobook, you agree that we get to come over and kick you in the ass." Makers, read by Bernadette Dunne MP3 Sample Buy Makers Audiobook on Borders

Read by Kara Shallenberg and Michelle Crandall. Enjoy this reading? Let me know at http://kayray.org/category/audiobooks/

The Decameron. Send questions and comments to info@librivox.org

The 12th and final episode of Brand Gamblin s scifi tale, Tumbler, has been added. Now you can can enjoy any and all episodes at your leisure!

Dr. Sloper speaks with his sisters Mrs. Penniman and Mrs. Almond.

One of the oddities in the LibriVox catalog is our recording of James Joyce s Ulysses. It gets not-infrequent complaints, well-deserved I suppose if a listener is expecting, oh, an audiobook of James Joyce s Ulysses. While some of the chapters of that book are read straight up, it was an early project where creative interpretations were encouraged, and there are some strange chapters in there. The first chapter, one I participated in, seems to stop many listeners in their tracks. The recorders of chapter one have been called: fools, jerks, jocks, idiots, criminals and worse; the recording has been called: an insult to Joyce, an insult to listeners, an insult to literature, a travesty, a hoax, a bad joke, and embarrassing, among other things. One listener suggested that his dog would do a better job of making the recording. Of course I tell every complainant that we ll put up alternate versions along with the originals if they wish to record it for us, as is standard LibriVox policy; so far no one has produced another recording for us. Still I thought it worthwhile to give a bit of context to our version of Ulysses. LibriVox started in late August 2005, really got rolling in September 2005; by the end of October 05, we d completed eight (yes, 8) books: Conrad s Secret Agent; Frank L Baum s Road to Oz; Dostoyevsky s Notes from the Underground; Washington Irving s Old Christmas, Henry James International Episode (both requests from the Internet Archive), Call of the Wild, Frankenstein, and PG Wodehouse s Psmith in the City. All reasonable, approachable, easy books. And relatively short. And so when I proposed Ulysses as a book we should tackle, in early November 2005, just two months and change after LibriVox came into being there was something of a gasp in our little (at the time) community of free-public-domain-audiobook makers Ulysses? Joyce s Ulysses? Yikes. We were only figuring out how to manage more than a handful of projects at the time. We were just a bunch of strangers who thought it would be fun to make free audiobooks, and we were cobbling together a way to get it done by anyone in the world who wanted to help out. But: Ulysses? In the spirit of taking on impossible tasks (our objective, after all, is to record every public domain text in the universe and give the audiobooks away for free), we jumped in. Ulysses project start date: November 8, 2005; finish date: June 16, 2007 (19 months later). Because Ulysses seemed like such a crazy project, we added some special rules to go along with the recording of this, probably the most intimidating book in the English language: 1.editing allowed but not required you can record it as is. bad sound, backround noise, whatever, will add to the experience, I *think* JJ would approve 2. extra points for recording in a pub or public place (on the street is good) 3. bonus points if you record in dublin 4. you are encouraged to get others to help you record your chapter 5. more extra points for getting several people to record with you in a pub. 6. square those points if those other people are strangers 7. Target completion date: midnight, June 14 (2006) [actual completion: June 16, 2007] [You can see the forum discussions from the project thread when it was launched]. And with that set of special guidelines, off we went, with little regard for anything except trying to make a free audio version of Ulysses, or at least something like that. This project was and is truly different than anything else LibriVox did because we were so liberal in approach to the text. But to me, anyway, it paralleled the madness of LibriVox itself. We were driven not by thoughts of who might listen, but rather by the wonderful craziness of the idea of getting a bunch of amateurs to try to record the darned thing; and that crazy idea was translated, I can report, into wonderful craziness on the evening of the recording of Chapter One of Ulysses, at my house. An indescribable night of art and performance and bacchanalia, at the end of which there was an audio document, an mp3. It would take a year-and-a-half before the rest of the chapters would be finished, and published. Would anyone listen? Who knew? Who cared? [I can't remember what the total downloads we'd had in those first couple of months of LibriVox, but it couldn't have been more than a few hundred, possibly a few thousand]. As for the other chapters of our Ulysses, there is so much variety in that audiobook: from the chaotic and impromptu, to the straight, to the ambitiously artistic (see: Chapter 15f [mp3]) and the abstract (see: Chapter 18 [mp3]). The point with LibriVox in the early days (and, I would argue, still) was just to make these recordings, and to keep making them, to encourage more people to make, and give away, recordings of books they cared about, until we d finished recording all the books there were to record. We just hoped that someone somewhere might find some use for some of these audiobooks at some point. Our focus though has always been on the readers, the volunteers, the people making recordings they are our true constituents; that the rest of the world gets a library of free audiobooks has always seemed to me to be a wonderful fringe benefit of our true work, which is helping people make and give away recordings of texts they love. And of course, we ve always had the following policy: if you do not like any of our recordings, please record an alternate version for us and we ll post it along with the first. Still, knowing that Ulysses is a strange beast, our catalog page states the following: NOTE: Because of the nature of this project, there was a bending of usual LibriVox procedures: pub-like background noise was encouraged, as well as creative group readings; and no editing was required, so in places there may be some accidental variation from the original text. Listener be warned! So, if you find yourself listening to our recording of Ulysses agreeing with our previous correspondents who think we are insulting poor James Joyce s memory by allowing such an audiobook to exist, here are some practical responses: We encourage multiple recordings of the same text. Your version of any chapter of Ulysses would be welcomed heartily (so far we ve had no takers for adding other versions of the existing Ulysses chapters which is another good reason to have such an idiosyncratic first chapter perhaps it is so hard to listen to that someone finally will get fed up and gives us another version two-and-a-half years later, we re still waiting). There is, as of today, a catalog of 2879 non-Ulysses audiobooks for you to choose from I can recommend a few if you like There is no other recording like Ulysses in the LibriVox catalog everything else is recorded to the best of our ability to conform to the text (Oh, actually somewhere in there is a New Year s recording of Shakespeare s Sonnet XXVIII [mp3] [text] that is not far off the Ulysses aesthetic). So, perhaps you won t like our recording of Ulysses. Or, perhaps you might pour yourself one of your favourite beverages, and sit down to listen to, and enjoy a chaotic performance of Joyce s chaotic work. But the thing we wish, more than anything else, is that you would make a recording for us: of Ulysses, or any other public domain text that you love dearly, and think ought to be available in audio format to the whole world, for free.

Dr. Sloper speaks with his sisters Mrs. Penniman and Mrs. Almond.