Audio: Literary Classics as Podcasts

LibriVox sees its mission as the “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.” A digital library of free public domain audio books that are read and recorded by volunteers, in a year and a half of operation it has amassed over 150 recordings. The outfit’s catalog includes an impressive range of books, short works and poems from writers as diverse as Jane Austen, Aesop, Coleridge, Descartes, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Henry James, Kafka, Lao-Tze, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Twain, Wilde and Wodehouse. Stories for children, such as “The Wind in the Willows,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Max und Moritz” and “Anne of Green Gables,” are included, as well as such nonfiction works as Machiavelli’s “The Prince” and Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.” Most of the materials are in English, but there are also recordings in German, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Japanese, among other languages. <http://www.librivox.org/>