Sometimes I get infected by internet-craze which demonstrates itself by my body glued to my laptop for hours and hours and hours... It's when I find something new, interesting and fascinating, which makes all the other activities look pale and boring in comparison. Today - actually yesterday as I am 10 minutes into a new day now - I've found LibriVox. This is 
another social-networking/Web 2.0 plain looking, forum-based platform, but what a beauty it is! Several hundred of its volunteers produce free audiobooks for all the planet to listen to. You can find many classics in their catalogue and it's growing each day and each hour. As with everything what I write about I joined them. As overexcited as I was I could not stop from being slightly disappointed to find out that most of the books available there were in English and readers/volunteers in other languages had just started to emerge. After very quick registration process I suddenly recalled that I had an accent! However I was quickly reassured by the nicest site administrators ever that I could read in my own language and in English with my accent no matter what. Their motto is "Acoustical liberation of books in the public domain" - and this can be interpreted in many ways, indeed. Liberation as when all public domain books are easily available to all of the public, as when you only need your ears to function properly to read (well, listen to) a book, as when one can find both originals and translations of the books in many languages, and as when you can find all the books from around the world! Oh, dear, I do feel grateful for living in this day and age!
Through LibriVox I have also acquainted myself with new piece of freeware: Audacity - that helps to record audio files. It's very simple to use once you get past the fear of all the buttons, and is quite useful for recording your own voice (if you are fond of your own voice, of course, or if you volunteered for LibriVox) and for editing music tracks and converting everything into mp3.
And what it is about my diagnosis you are probably asking yourself: my internet-craze syndrom has resulted in one hour of recordings for LibriVox today... Oh well, I am off to sleep!
___________
Photo is from Flickr but ScribeFire doesn't show authors of pictures - I've found it's weak point!
another social-networking/Web 2.0 plain looking, forum-based platform, but what a beauty it is! Several hundred of its volunteers produce free audiobooks for all the planet to listen to. You can find many classics in their catalogue and it's growing each day and each hour. As with everything what I write about I joined them. As overexcited as I was I could not stop from being slightly disappointed to find out that most of the books available there were in English and readers/volunteers in other languages had just started to emerge. After very quick registration process I suddenly recalled that I had an accent! However I was quickly reassured by the nicest site administrators ever that I could read in my own language and in English with my accent no matter what. Their motto is "Acoustical liberation of books in the public domain" - and this can be interpreted in many ways, indeed. Liberation as when all public domain books are easily available to all of the public, as when you only need your ears to function properly to read (well, listen to) a book, as when one can find both originals and translations of the books in many languages, and as when you can find all the books from around the world! Oh, dear, I do feel grateful for living in this day and age!Through LibriVox I have also acquainted myself with new piece of freeware: Audacity - that helps to record audio files. It's very simple to use once you get past the fear of all the buttons, and is quite useful for recording your own voice (if you are fond of your own voice, of course, or if you volunteered for LibriVox) and for editing music tracks and converting everything into mp3.
And what it is about my diagnosis you are probably asking yourself: my internet-craze syndrom has resulted in one hour of recordings for LibriVox today... Oh well, I am off to sleep!
___________
Photo is from Flickr but ScribeFire doesn't show authors of pictures - I've found it's weak point!
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