At the end of the year, I wrote about the passing of Greg Newby, who was born in Montreal and died in Whitehorse. He played an important role on Project Gutenberg and was remembered as a " "Fourth Industrial Revolution visionary,” who helped marshal the chaotic, creative forces of the early internet to help serve the public interest....” Thousands of books are now available and can be read for free via Project Gutenberg.
Hugh McGuire & LibriVox
Since then, I have learned that a Canadian in Montreal is also a participant in another positive project involving the Internet, at a time when there is much about the Internet that is perceived as having negative consequences. His name is Hugh McGuire, and because of him people can listen, for free, to over 20,000 books that are in the public domain. He founded LibriVox over twenty years ago.
At Librivox.org, you can listen to books, or volunteer to read and/or record them. LibriVox:
-is a non-commercial, non-profit and ad-free project
-donates its recordings to the public domain
-is powered by volunteers
-maintains a loose and open structure
-welcomes all volunteers from across the globe, in all languages.
You can learn a bit about Mr. McGuire at a site of his, which looks to be rather old and where he describes himself as “an aging idealist.” There is no Wikipedia entry for him, but there is for LibriVox , where the picture of Mr. McGuire was found.
He also started Pressbooks, a book publishing company, in 2011 and is still the Executive Chairman. If perhaps you want to publish a book of your own, Pressbooks is a "user-friendly digital" publisher.
I stumbled upon this information and thought the the accomplishments of Mr. McGuire, a Canadian, should be noted. I have to confess, however, that I have never listened to an audiobook and should do so. While looking for information about Mr. McGuire and LibriVox, I did discover an article by someone who does listen to audio books and, in it, she acknowledges the importance of LibriVox and McGuire during the pandemic. Here is a portion from: "Audio Books Aid Isolation of Pandemic; Louise Rachlis Takes Refuge From Today's Crisis in Classics From the Past, " Louise Rachlis, Ottawa Citizen, Aug. 21, 2020.
I had no Great Expectations, but discovering audio books has transported me Far from the Madding Crowd.
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ... it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair ..." I marched in loops around the canal, over the Pretoria Bridge and the Flora footbridge, my iPhone in my pocket, the earbuds in my ears as the powerful words of A Tale of Two Cities distracted me from the pandemic at hand.
My isolation coping strategy hasn't been baking, but books. Audio books to be specific. I've walked, and sometimes run, with audio books for hundreds of hours. I'd never been an audio book person; I read pocket books while travelling, hardcover books in the bathtub, and e-books in bed. I always considered audio books were for long car trips, and I rarely had any of those. But suddenly in March, the only break from social isolation was to go for a walk in the neighbourhood. And during those walks, I discovered the joy and the distraction of LibriVox audio books. I loved that LibriVox was founded by Montrealer Hugh McGuire in 2005 to provide "acoustical liberation of books in the public domain." All the readers are volunteers, but you wouldn't know it from many of their professional-sounding voices."
Source:
Almost twenty years ago, this source discusses the origin of LibriVox: "Power of the Spoken Book: Hugh McGuire Went Online About a Year Ago to Look for a Free Audio Book Recording: His Surfing Took Him to Project Gutenberg, a Free Online Repository of Books and Other Works in the Public Domain - But He Came up Empty-handed," Craig Silverman, Montreal Gazette, Oct. 7, 2006.
"I went through the Gutenberg catalogue and found they had very little audio, which was a surprise," he says.
McGuire was searching for a recording of a Joseph Conrad novel whose copyright had expired, meaning anyone was free to make a recording of it. But no one had, and so McGuire, 32, a computer programmer and writer in Montreal, decided to fill the void.
He set up a blog to gather volunteers to record free audio books of works whose copyright had expired. McGuire called his project LibriVox and he then "emailed a bunch of friends and people doing literature podcasts and blogs to ask if they were interested in joining in," he recalls during the first of two meetings at a St. Laurent Blvd. cafe.
Within a few hours, McGuire had enough volunteers to produce a recording of the book.
McGuire, a soft-spoken man with glasses and a light beard, then picks up his coffee and casually delivers a massive understatement, "It was clear to me very early on that this was a very interesting project."
Though McGuire is loath to brag about it, LibriVox.org has in one year grown to become the single largest repository of free audio books on the Internet. Its roughly 2,000 volunteers have recorded over 150 books and more than 200 recordings of short stories, plays, speeches, poems and documents like the Magna Carta and the U.S. Declaration of Independence. LibriVox offers works in French, German, Japanese, Hebrew, Finnish, Latin, Italian and Russian, with recordings currently under way in Arabic, Spanish, Swedish and Chinese. (English is by far the dominant language.) Every LibriVox recording is offered free for anyone to download, listen to, copy and share as they please. About 25,000 LibriVox books have been downloaded over the past year, McGuire says. LibriVox's success is a study in how blogs and other collaborative Internet technologies are enabling large groups of people from all over the world to come together and build not just a community but also something tangible, a product or service. In the case of LibriVox, they created a library of free audio books. A similar but much larger project, Wikipedia.org, is a massive free online encyclopedia with 3.8 million articles in more than 100 languages written and maintained by 48,000 volunteers."
[That is a portion of the long article and the picture is also from it.]
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