Classic texts, amateur audiobooks, and the grand future of online peer production In the dim, humid basement of his Maryland home, Michael Scherer, a tall 38-year-old with the long, square beard of a mandolin player or a monk, leans toward a rebuilt Russian tube microphone, desperate for silence so he can begin recording a 200-year-old essay by an American founding father. Even in the makeshift studio he has constructed, with thick blankets hanging from nails in the joists and the basement windows plugged with fiberglass, the sounds of lawnmowers, car alarms, birds, air conditioners, and children kicking balls in the street still intrude. “I have to hold on a minute here—there’s a, there’s a truck,” he says. A few seconds later, the truck passes, and he reads in his deep, resonant voice, “The Federalist.” He stops, clears his throat, and begins again. “The Federalist, No. 19.” Scherer posts some of his recordings to LibriVox, an online community of several thousand people all over the world who read and record public domain books, then post them as podcasts that can be downloaded for free. Some LibriVoxers read; others proof, tag, and catalog the sound files, greet newbies, or manage ongoing book projects. After about a year and a half, LibriVox’s catalog contains more than 400 completed works, including novels, poems, histories, travel books, and plays, making it one of the largest audiobook publishers. The goal? To record every book in the public domain, which means everything published before 1923.

The popularity of portable music players such as the iPod has made audiobooks more accessible to people for portable listening. This has led to a boom in the creation of free audiobooks from Librivox and similar projects that take works from the public domain and enlist volunteers to read them. Audiobooks also can be created with text to speech software, although the quality of synthesised speech may suffer by comparison to voice talent recordings. Audiobooks in the private domain are also distributed online by for-profit companies such as Media Bay, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), Spoken Word, Naxos, Audioville, Bookstolistento and Audible.com, which in 2006 generated $82.2 million USD in revenue through sales of downloadable audiobooks and other spoken-word content.