Sunday, September 21, 2008

e-books

I used LibriVox to look for some e-books. http://librivox.org/.
To search for a book, I had to enter the title of the book and the author.
For status, I left it to say 'any'

When I searched for Macbeth by William Shakespeare, I had to download the audio file (mp3) for the particular act of the play, which opened up through Winamp when I opened the file.
I didn't know that I had to download the file in order to listen to it, in the first place.
What I found quite interesting was, that people volunteered to be readers of a Act, and so when listening to it, the voices constantly changed throughout the Acts.
Some of the Act had not been read by readers, so it had a status of available (for volunteers to take over) or assigned (waiting for the volunteer to finish reading it).

My next search was for Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.
The search produced a page with downloadable chapters in mp3 files or ogg files.
Here, what I liked about downloading the mp3 files was that you could choose between 64kbps or 128kbps.
Oliver Twist was also read by a different reader for every chapter.

Overall, I think it was quite easy to search for classic books and it's really cool to be able to have access to them through Internet instead of having it in hard copy. And LibriVox is free to use too.

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