Audiobooks: Two Reasons to Congratulate Hugh McGuire and the LibriVox Team

What are those two reasons?
Direct to LibriVox web site.
1. LibriVox reports that over 100,000,000 public domain audiobooks have been downloaded (free) from their digital collection on the Internet Archive site.

“The LibriVox collection is one of the most popular on the Internet Archive,” said Brewster Kahle, Founder and Director of the Internet Archive. “100 million downloads is awesome. LibriVox is an integral part of our commitment to making important texts available to the world in the best format for people, and we are thrilled at the support from the Mellon Foundation.”

At the moment, LibriVox has close to 5,500 titles available for download.
But wait, there’s more!
2. LibriVox has been awarded a grant from the Mellon Foundation. The funding will go towards rebuilding LibriVox’s technical infrastructure and improving accessibility of the LibriVox website.
Finally, LibriVox is hiring some tech staff. Details here.
Btw, as we mentioned the other day in our comments on the Pew eBook report, perhaps the library community should be considering how we can do better with providing to audiobooks to users. To start, LibriVox would a fantastic resource to let them know about.
Again, a virtual “tip o’ the cap” (or a bite of a fantastic Montreal bagel) to Hugh and the entire LibriVox team. (-:
Direct to LibriVox Blog Post
Direct to LibriVox Catalog

Filed under: Funding, Libraries, Patrons and Users, Publishing, Reports