Books! More books!

This Sony e-reader was, without a doubt, the best present I ever bought myself. This is one of those things that (a) I'm shocked I went so long without, and (2) will never be without again.

I have read so much more since getting this. I have always loved to read, during some phases of my life reading an insane number of books. For awhile I'd kind of stopped reading, for a bunch of reasons. Much as I like to read, I'm picky about what I read. All of my books are still packed away. I hadn't gotten around to starting to use the library on a more regular basis.

The e-reader changed all that, because I have access to thousands of books - free! - from my computer. No due dates, no storing physical books. Oh, joy. And it's so convenient ... I don't have to worry about remembering to grab whatever book I'm currently reading and take it with me everywhere I go, or hassle with toting it around if it's a large book. If I find myself stuck waiting somewhere unexpectedly, no more thinking, "I wish I'd have remembered to bring my book." The e-reader gets stashed in my bag every time I leave the house, it's so small and light it takes up no room, but it's always handy. In fact, now an unexpected wait is instead a good thing - "Oh, I can read a little more!"

Initially I read a bunch more of War and Peace, but then made the mistake of getting off on a few tangents, and haven't gotten back to it yet. I read Treasure Island last week, and I'm now a third of the way into Two Years Before The Mast.

But the biggest bonus of the e-reader was discovering LibriVox. This place rocks! It's a volunteer project with the goal of turning every book which is in the public domain into audiobooks, which you can download free from their website. They have an awesome website, well put together, easy to navigate and use, where all of this work takes place.

The entire project is entirely volunteer, from the admin staff who run the thing (all super, super nice!) to every person who reads and records texts for the audio books. The coolest part is, anyone can volunteer. You don't need any experience, they have FAQs and a wiki and a plethora of help files to teach you everything you need to know to do this!

I've signed up, and have already recorded a chapter of a book, which is now in their project file, and when the entire book is completed, will be available as an audiobook on their website.

A large majority of the book projects are collaborative efforts. A book is chosen to be turned into an audiobook (most of the text files come from Project Gutenberg) and posted in a forum on the Librivox site. Then different people volunteer to read different chapters. You can read one or as many as you'd like, but the premise in the "collaberative" effort is that one person doesn't read the entire book.

As each chapter is uploaded, another volunteer 'proof-listens' for any major mistakes, such as long gaps or repeated passages.

When all the chapters have been read and proof-listened, then the files are combined into one audiobook by the admin staff, and made available on the site.

They also allow 'solo recordings,' where one person chooses a public domain text, and records the entire book by themselves. You upload it and the project's coordinator turns it into the audiobook file and puts it up on their webpage, like everything else.

I may try a solo project soon, but I wanted to get some practice doing chapters of collaberative works first. Recording yourself reading text is, on the one hand, pretty simple, but on the other, not quite as simple as it sounds - if you want it to sound good. The speed with which you read and speak is important, so if you do both fast in 'real life,' it's helpful to moderate it a little bit. It's nice to have some varied inflection in your voice appropriate to the text, and maybe change your voice a bit for different speaking parts - something that didn't come naturally to me at first, so I've had to work on. It's a trick to get some variation, without overdoing it and sounding fake. Also, it's much more time-consuming than it sounds. There's a lot going on! I've recorded myself singing before, but never reading - in fact, I've never known myself to have read out loud before. So it's a really interesting, brand new experience. At first I wasn't even sure I'd like it, but now I'm kind of mildly addicted to it, and can't wait to do some more!

I also discovered they are doing an audiobook of "A Pirate's Own Book," but all the chapters are already assigned to readers, so I volunteered to proof-listen instead, which is also fun (you get to hear snippets of books without investing in the whole thing - if you like it you can always go download the entire thing when it's done, or get the e-book version - and proof-listening doesn't take nearly as long as recording, so it's a quick, easy way to volunteer).

So if you love books, reading, literature, etc., go check out Librivox! I'm serious, this is a whole lotta fun, for a really good cause! (And no, no one asked me to say any of this ... I'm just so psyched about the project, I wanted to share it with everyone). You don't need any special skills, and only minimal equipment which you already have or can get free (explained on the site). They don't require you to have a 'special' kind of voice, in fact one of their premises is that the sheer variety of people's reading voices is what makes the projects special, and there is no "right" or "wrong" type of voice (as long as you can read clearly enough to be understood by the listener!).

(climbing off my soapbox now)

Hey, I just had a thought - as a bonus, I'm going to stick a widget in the sidebar with a link to the page containing any recordings I do, so you can check them out if you want. (Pages on the Librivox site will get moved as the project moves through different phases, so I will have to try to remember to update my links when that happens).