At “Les stratégies d’innovation dans le Web 2.0″ conference, Hugh McGuire gave us some background on Librivox.org, a very interesting audio book creation community.

Picture by Philippe Martin

Highlights:

• Librivox is a project to get volunteers to record audio versions of public domain books.
• 2500 volunteers
• Probably one of the most prolific audio book producers in the world
• Currently 1800 books in their catalog (60 to 70 new books a month)
• Using WordPress for their web site
• Home page clearly tells you what you can do on the site.  You can listen or you can volunteer (read for them).
• 40,000 visits a day, millions of downloads
• Lot of dedication in the community with a hyper-active group at the top, maybe 50 people who contributed the majority of audio books
• Internet Archive hosts everything.
• Inspiration for the project came from the free software movement, how pragmatically successful it was.  Wikipedia and podcasting were also inspiring.
• Long-term vision: objective to record every public domain work in audio.