Thanks to LibriVox

In recent years, mostly walking around Lake Harriet, I’ve listened to quite a few books that volunteers have recorded for LibriVox—all of them safely out of copyright, all free, all “classics” of one sort or another. Some have been collaborative projects, involving many readers, and some solo projects, accomplished by a single reader. I remember these, which are all worth hearing:

At the start of “Learning from LibriVox,” the chapter that I contributed to Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, ed. Matthew Rubery (New York: Routledge, 2011), 199–215, I noted that the practice of reading aloud had begun to disappear late in the nineteenth century, and that the recent vogue for audiobooks may partly repair that loss. Richard Grant White lamented the decline of communal reading in 1880:

Reading aloud has fallen into disuse in families and in the social circle, because we read so much. The newspaper and the cheap novel have combined to bring this about. We rise from the table, we seize each of us a newspaper or a new paper-covered novel, and we plunge into their pages, and sit unsociably silent. We even resent the reading of anything aloud to us, because it interrupts our own selfish solitary pleasure, and because we think that we could have read the passage so much more quickly by ourselves. The pleasure of a common enjoyment is disregarded in favor of our own greedy devouring of our silent, solitary mental meal; the charm of the sound of the human voice, conveying to us shades of meaning and points of emphasis, is undervalued, and seems to be passing away as one of the delights of life. (Every-day English, 108)

An audiobook reading, whether published by LibriVox or another agency, offers to restore something of that “charm of the sound of the human voice,” at least partly “conveying to us shades of meaning, and points of emphasis”—if not actually freeing us from our solitariness and restoring the pleasures of “the social circle.”


For an account of the recent boom in commercial audio books see Jennifer Maloney, "The Stars Align for Audiobooks," Wall Street Journal July 22, 2016: D1-D2, which notes that "smartphones have propelled the rise of audiobooks" (D2).

Michael Hancher ● July 24, 2016; updated June 27, 2021

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