Hey everyone,
Just thought I'd remind/introduce people to this amazing service (this is my personal favourite 'bargain' of all time). It's supported by the Internet Archive foundation, and is a not-for-profit community where volunteers get together and narrate audiobooks. There are SO MANY amazing recordings on here for FREE, but here are the catches:
1) Recordings are almost exclusively of out-of-copyright books, I haven't found this to be a problem at all since I love the classics.
2) Because they are done by the community, there can be some pretty low quality recordings. Instead of looking for a particular book, I often tend to stick with a narrator I like and then choose new books that sound interesting from their recordings, so gets around this (plus narrators tend to record books they like, so if you liked a book that a narrator read and then go check their other recordings, chances are you'll like those books too… it's almost like you're getting book recommendations at the same time!)
3) Many recordings involve an ensemble of 'various readers' (eg one per chapter / section of the book). I tend to not like these as much, so I stick with 'solo reader' versions, then at least you can listen to the first 5-10 mins of a recording and see if you like the reader's voice (many books have 3-4 versions of their recordings with an author, so you can sample the first few mins of each version and choose your fav reader :))
SOME OF MY FAVOURITES
- Mark F. smith (reader) is amazing. He's narrated over 100 books and I love his backlog. Some of my favourites include his Jules Verne narrations, HG wells narrations, Jack london narrations, and one of my favs: 'Beasts, men, and gods' which has been described as 'like lord of the rings, but a true story'
- David Clarke (reader), The entire sherlock holmes series (including all of the mini-stories collections + the full length books), and probably my favourite recording of all time 'Count of monte cristo'. (reading that made me then get on the Alexander Dumas hype train, the entire three musketeers series + others were then consumed in a matter of weeks)
- Saki's short stories collections (most of these are 'various' readers, but graham redman has read a lot of the stories and he has a nice voice), especially 'the chronicles of clovis' (which is 'various' but not actually, read 99% by graham redman), clovis is basically a victorian-era shitstirrer it's fantastic, and saki's works are all fantstic commentaries on life in the victorian era
This is an amazing community / platform that really adds value to the world, and I've donated at https://librivox.org/pages/how-to-donate/, but you can also donate your time by reading or other ways (I'm planning on making a librivox mobile app, there are a few of them available already, but they don't really have the best UI tbh and I've found most are very basic and/or buggy/ outdated)
Thanks mate I like audiobooks and enjoyed reading the writeup.