All LibriBox Recordings Are In The Public Domain

Years ago I spent hours of each day reading books. I mean it. Hours! These days I am lucky to spend minutes reading a book. My brand new daughter tends to need some form of assistance or nurture every five to fifteen minutes. Either her mother tends to her or else I receive a directive from her mother as to what my daughter needs. I won't bother you with the ins and outs of my private life but needless to say, I pretty much hop to it. That means, book down. In the chaos that ensues one loses track of time and when you finally get back to your book it could be hours if not days away and by then you've lost the impetus required to keep you thrashing it out with the usually long and tedious setting up of the narrative for which, for example, Russian authors are famed for.

It was therefore a fabulous discovery the other week that I had stumbled across and added to my USB stick a downloaded recording I found on a bit torrent of an audio book. It was in fact War and Peace by my most treasured author Leo Tolstoy. The narrative was introduced by a woman who said "This is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information visit www.librivox.org" . Well, after I listened to chapter 27 of book one of War And Peace and I was rekindled with Bald Hills and old Prince Bolkonsky's dry wit, immediately I was hooked. 

As soon as I got home I could not turn on my old rusty laptop fast enough and I began downloading anything I could get my hands on. Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and more, the great authors of the zeitgeist period of the novel were all there waiting to be downloaded for free. Having downloaded my fill I realised I needed to be selective. I noticed that next to my bed I had my old copy of The Brothers Karamazov of which I had never managed to get past the fourth chapter. 

I am here to tell you that with the help of modern cars having a USB drive, LibriVox and a decent amount of drive time across Sydney during the work week, I no longer have as much anxiety surrounding the fact that I have no time to read any more. In fact, I estimate that within 3 more weeks I will have covered more ground than 3 years of my own reading. And the best news of all is: "All Librivox recordings are in the public domain".