Audiobooks

  This page is part of the OLPC Spoken Word Project.

Audiobooks are an important tool for learning a language, and are a source of edutainment.

Librivox is a group dedicated to producing Copyright free, public domain, human read audiobooks out of works in the Public Domain. Their content would serve well on the OLPC.

However: Librivox tends to let Archive.org encode their final work, so it ends up in two bitrates of MP3 and one of Ogg. For most purposes Ogg Vorbis is a great codec, however it is not the best encoding for audiobooks.

When you need an open codec for speech you should use Speex. Speex is supported under GStreamer and will be on First Release Laptops.

So, for Librivox Audiobooks to become part of the OLPC content bundle, they should be encoded in Speex.