“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

Monday, April 30, 2012

Ebooks and Audiobooks

Almost a year ago I bought an Ipad, and I have been delighted to discover all the different ebook programs that are available: Apple's Ibooks, Amazon's Kindle, Kobo (affiliated with Borders), and others like StoryKit, Stanza, ICDL, and txtr ebooks. I have also recently bought a Samsung Android phone, where I have a similar listing of programs, and other cool projects such as Wattpad, where writers share their work with readers for an amateur list of e-shorts.

These have led me to reconnect with a project I heard of quite a while ago -- the Project Gutenberg, where they are aiming to share all the copyright expired books of the world and make them accessible and digitized.

I recently heard that this has been taken one step further -- volunteers are now making audiobooks of these books so they are available in both text and audio format. I think it's a really great project! It's run by LibriVox, and more about what the ideals of the internet were -- sharing information and making it available to everyone. Just like I'm addicted to Ted Talks, I think I'll soon be downloading lots of free audiobooks.