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From what I see it is mostly audio books.
Source: The majority of public domain books, are digitized by Gutenberg.org and recorded by Librivox.org.
When you click on a book you can listen to chapters right there.
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Reviews for The Mystery of the Yellow Room, Gaston Leroux
5 stars: yeh duniya yeh duniya pittal di....baby doll tu sone di...hahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,.abbe thik se par ...
5 stars: The book was interesting, but the narration quality ranged from horrendous (Chapter 20) to excellent.
3 stars: The book is good, and most of the readers too. Although one or two of the readers had quite a strong accent, which unfortunately made some chapters a little tiresome to listen to.
5 stars: Good book except I had a hard time following the characters with French names. I ended up reading about the book on Wikipedia to understand who was who and accidently read too far and found out who the real murderer was before I was done with the book. Bummer.
3 stars: The plot is great but it is read by more than one reader. One of the readers I find is fantastic but there is another whom has a very quiet voice and I struggle to hear her and I find her rather dull voice really difficult to listen to. I actually gave up and listen to another book before returning to this story because I couldn't always hear that particular readers very soft voice and accent.
5 stars: A very good mystery novel. Most chapters are really well read and the story keeps you hooked.
What, no viruses, no trojans?
8 comments:
I bailed on the lecture series about Benjamin Franklin. I think maybe I'm starting to derive a rule: If the lecturer's CV has a bunch of public appearances on it, like NPR or some TV show, take a pass. There'll be lots of filler. And the delivery will be chirpy, whether male or female.
Yesterday I swapped the Franklin disks out for a lecture series on astronomy, which I thought risky given its purely audio nature, but I was wrong.
Get this. Did you know that the solar system charts we all know from school are wrong? Out of scale?
That's right people. If the Earth were a marble, then the sun would be a wagon wheel a football field away.
Now, go ahead and try to tell me that's not news you can use.
I feel kind of bad for ragging on the Franklin disks. I mean, it's not as if I learned nothing. For example, the jars are pronounced Lay-dun, not Lye-don, the way I thought.
PROGRESS!!1!!1!!!!!!!!
Years ago I downloaded a bunch of stuff from Librevox, but found I'd been spoiled by professional readers/actors. The first Librevox was just not listenable. After sampling the rest I deleted them all. Seriously, my text to speech option (computer generated) on Kindle is better. The lovely volunteers who do the reading are surely fine people, and I still feel vaguely guilty. But no. YMMV.
The majority of public domain books, however, are digitized by Gutenberg.org and recorded by Librivox.org.
Watch out, Amazon? I love Librivox, but concur that most its volunteers who read aloud probably shouldn't without more criticism and practice.
Maybe following the dulcet tones of its top volunteers to their other contributions could yield unsought subjects, replicating the bookstore stroll.
I can't do audio books. It is too distracting to have the book read to me. I start focusing on the reader's voice and how it doesn't match the inner voice that I have in my head when I read myself or hear the words spoken.
On the other end of the scale if the reader is doing a good job, then I get lost in the visualizations inside my head and start viewing it like a private movie. NOT good when driving a car.
The worst one was Morgan Freeman, who has an awesome voice, reading the part of a young woman. He pitched his voice a little higher and tried to sound like a teenage girl. REALLY??? I started laughing out loud and the rest of the people in the car got angry at me. Yelling at me to get serious and go back in the audio to not miss the parts that I was making fun of.
I don't drive and do audio books anymore.
A nice resource but they make you appreciate the professional readers. Some of them are so bad, I stopped listening. One reading of English classic had a thick Finnish accent, which made his reading of Thackeray surreal.
Right on DBQ. I tried to listen to A Confederacy of Dunces. The prologue makes much of the New Orleans Yat accent. Then the guy reading it (poorly) does does so in boilerplate Southern fried accent. I only got through the first chapter.
Listening while driving the Washington beltway is the only way to survive it. I still remember pulling up to a toll booth once with a porn scene in a romance novel blasting away.
Possession, by Hyatt was excruciating to listen to. First off, I couldn't skip all that Victorian poetry. Then the British cast gave the New Mexico guy a Charleston accent. Drove me crazy.
On the other hand, Cloud Atlas was much enhanced by listening. I was enchanted by the story told in island patois. My book club hated that part because they struggled to get the rhythm of the language.
It all depends on the book, don't you think?
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