We first covered LibriVox way back in 2007, and it’s great to see it’s still going strong. The open source service provides free volunteer created audiobooks for all, divided into a nicely categorized library. Think of it as the Gutenberg Press for audio books. One of the great features of the service is the fact that it also offers foreign language audio, which is something sorely lacking in the literary world.

The library now holds over 7000 works in 34 languages, and there are nearly 6000 ‘readers’ who are the volunteers who sit there and generously donate their time to reading and recording the books for the library.

The new site design revamp has really spruced things up too, with a beautiful clean interface and great search functions. As you’d expect the books on offer all come from the public domain, so it’s mostly older titles and the classics, but in amongst the catalog you’ll find some real gems, especially in the Children’s section.

The project is on an eternal hunt for volunteer readers and they’re also looking for some cash at the moment to fund their operations, so do feel free to help where you can. It’s a great initiative and one that deserves to have more exposure.