For Those Too Busy, Lazy or Illiterate To Read

Whenever we have to pass by a Books On Tape section of a retail giant we get kind of weirded out by the selection. Dan Brown, Self Help, Self Help, Dan Brown, Mitch Albom, Self Help. Hey self helpers, step one to recovery is setting enough time aside to sit the fuck down and read a book. There are some uses, though. A friend of Seattlest's was so bored at an undemanding job up in B'ham that he took to feeding NYT and Harpers articles through a text-to-speech program and slapping them on his iPod so MSMary could read him the news while he did his busywork. We'd like to take this opportunity to point him to LibriVox.

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (through a podcast, catalog, and bit torrents). We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project, and we operate almost exclusively through Internet communications.

So far they only have about 150 completed books and they're all from a ways back (thus the expired copyright), but they aren't wasting any time on the self help books of yore (How to Survive Pestilence and Plague With Your 'Self' Intact); There's Alger, Burroughs, Dostoyevsky, London, Twain and Wodehouse. And, uh, the United States Rubber Company. The Short Works and Collections section might be the right place to look for something that lasts about a bus ride, though, and there's some poetry, non-fiction and children's books as well.

So many choices...we don't know what to put on the iPod for the ride home from work. How about Irving, Washington. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow?