Librivox is a web site where you will find audiobooks read and recorded by volunteers who give them freely to you and any visitor. It is mostly english books and works, but there starts to appear a few non-english literature (some French, some German, for example).
The selected works are part of the public domain and are no longer covered by copyright. The readers are volunteers and sometimes share the reading of a long book between several people (a novel may be split in chapters read by seevral different people). Download is completely free and there is also a podcast feature on the web site.
The catalog currently contains a bit more than 100 long books and some more short works. Some examples:
- Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Who does not know it?)
- Swift, Jonathan. A Modest Proposal where Gulliver’s travels author ironically proposes to solve starvation of poor catholic children by raising them to sell them to protestant families.
- Tagore, Rabindranath. Sadhana, the Realisation of Life
- Yeats, William Butler. The Song of Wandering Aengus (some poetry, too).
As the downloaded files are completely free of any DRM kind, they can be read on any MP3 or OGG Vorbis walkman.
This could be useful to people willing to listen to classical works from their car or while jogging, unable to read, or willing to learn a new language by listening to it.