Like Project Gutenberg, Librivox is a project driven by a community of volunteers. At this site will be found human-read audio versions of public domain books. Its page header is sub-titled “Acoustical Liberation of Books in the Public Domain,” and the site declares the project’s objective is “To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.”
A relative newcomer on the internet scene, Librivox was inspired by other community-oriented projects such as Wikipedia, Creative Commons & the Free Software movement. The project was founded in 2005 by Montreal writer and web developer Hugh McGuire. Amazingly, the annual budget of Librivox is $0 - hosting is donated by SharkSpace and uses a WordPress weblog platform. Texts read are all public domain, mainly from Project Gutenberg or similar sources, and are read by unpaid volunteers. I wasn’t able to find a tally of available texts, but suffice it to say this is an ongoing effort that has produced quite a volume of free, quality audiobooks for your listening pleasure. Books are available, as well, in several languages other than English.
As books must be published texts that are in the public domain, what you will find at Librivox are mostly older texts, those we fondly regard as classics. This is wonderful for young readers, who may be ready to listen to and understand texts that are still a tad difficult for them to read unaided. It’s also a boon to the visually impaired, who have traditionally had to pay a premium for the “luxury” of listening to books rather than reading them from print.
If you are a homeschooler you may find that using audiobooks is a very handy thing. Burning files to a disc is much less costly than printing and binding a hard copy, and especially if you have several young homeschoolers, supplementing your “hard copy” texts with a few audiobooks will save you a good deal of strain on your vocal cords! Use the books to allow younger children to explore literature independently while you accomplish other tasks, or make a cup of tea and snuggle up with the kids so you can listen together.
Librivox files are generally available as MP3’s and OGG files. Free players are available for both formats, and the books are easily transferred to a portable device or burned onto disc. No DRM! This allows you to “read” a book in the car or on the public transit, while sunning yourself in the backyard or the park, or pretty much anywhere you can listen to a CD or MP3’s.
Homeschoolers who are on the go can burn several books to a single disc, or transfer a block of files to a portable MP3 player. Voilà! Readings are now portable for a whole day (or week, or whatever…..) This beats lugging books for several kids when you know you’ll be visiting Nanny for a few days! And kids may just be better behaved on the trip over if they know they’ll have to listen so they can narrate or write a summary! OK, maybe this last one is wishful thinking…. 
Will you be able to find all the texts you need at Librivox? Our experience is that a good number of the Ambleside Online selections are already available, and some others are in progress. We were able to find perhaps 25% of the books we needed, with our favourites probably being H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story, and Kipling’s Just So Stories. Many of the individual tales of Aesop’s Fables were available, as are Peter Pan and Little Women. There are a number of books by celebrated children’s authors such as Frances Hodgson Burnett, Lucy Maud Montgomery and Lewis Carroll. For somewhat older students look for Twain, Dickens, Thoreau and Shakespeare among the many authors whose works are offered.
Search the Librivox catalog by author or title. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can volunteer to set up a project to record it! Or look in the links section for other audiolit projects.
If your family can help out, consider volunteering to read or “proof listen” on one of the many open projects. It could certainly be an educational experience!
Another good site for free children’s audio-books:
This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a
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