The Wealth of LibriVox

Classic texts, amateur audiobooks, and the grand future of online peer production

Michael Erard from the May 2007 issue

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On the other hand, for as much good will as LibriVoxers show each other (the forums sparkle with cheery throw-your-shoulder-to-the-wheel sentiments), they don’t pay that much attention to listeners. You can click on titles in the catalog and read the entire online discussion that took place produce it, but the conversation is there mostly so volunteers can track the status of projects they’ve worked on. It’s not that they don’t care about listeners, McGuire and other Libri­Voxers will tell you; it’s that LibriVox, as its most fundamental level, isn’t about consumption. It’s about making stuff.

Infoworld’s Udell acknowledges that listening to LibriVox entails some tradeoffs. But “once you open this up to a universe of a billion or more producers, at a certain point there’s going to be someone who cares enough about this book to do a really good job. The quality argument is germane, but if I were Audible, I wouldn’t hang my hat on it.”

Jimmy Wales, the founder of the user-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia, was another early fan of LibriVox. “It’s natural Audible would say that,” Wales says. “It’s a standard response from people doing proprietary stuff.” Part of their model, he says, is an assumption that talent in the world is rare and must be gathered, protected, and developed by studios. But if talent is actually much more widely dispersed, that means that the studio system has effectively embargoed the dissemination of cultural products, keeping the price artificially high. Such embargoes can be circumvented through collaborative projects like LibriVox or a related project, Musopen, that records and archives performances of public domain music, much of which languishes unrecorded because it has too little commercial value.

LibriVox could still founder if core volunteers such as McGuire or Shallenberg were to burn out or if participants felt they were being exploited. But even if LibriVox were to disappear, something else would take its place, because it’s not a fad. As Benkler explains in The Wealth of Networks, commons-based peer production projects like LibriVox and Wikipedia are sure to become more common. All the work, he notes, is done on personal computers, whose costs don’t need to be recouped by households as they would be in corporations. Furthermore, the raw materials—public domain books—can be used for free. And the work can be segmented or chunked, which makes volunteering more appealing because people can choose their level of involvement. For Benkler, producing culture and sharing information are intrinsic human activities that would exist at some level regardless of the technology. But with the technologies we have now, they’re much more widespread. “Part of the popularity of LibriVox is that it’s not about computers, even though it’s enabled by computers,” McGuire says.

So how will the commercial world interact with the public street that LibriVoxers have built? “The whole question of how commercial firms interface with commons-based peer production is a hugely important subject,” Benkler says. It’s unlikely that LibriVox would ever put a dent in Audible’s annual $63 million business, but it represents a strong, deep undercurrent for books and reading that commercial publishers should find promising. Benkler suggests a scenario in which the LibriVox model is enlisted to resurrect the commercial potential of books that are no longer in their prime. Of all the books published in the last 84 years, only those published in 1923 have entered the public domain, even though less than 2 percent of all those books have remained in print for more than a year. This means there’s a huge literary stockpile of out-of-print books trapped by copyright that the mass market can’t justify re-releasing but which might be attractive to niche groups. A niche group, that is, like LibriVox.

One big publisher, sitting on a treasure trove of travel books or romances, could make them available to LibriVox (or a peer production group like it) under an increasingly popular form of intellectual property protection called a Creative Commons license, aimed at making copyright more flexible. The group could be authorized to record and release books, making them available for free. That might help a publisher see what items on the backlist should be resuscitated. Once drawn out of the woodwork and energized, the peer production groups could also be mobilized by publishing houses as grassroots support for new authors, much as indie rock bands depend on a devoted fan base. Benkler acknowledges that it’s still unlikely that a major trade publisher will allow such a project, but academic publishers might be more willing to experiment with using books as platforms for other activities from which they do not profit directly. If they’re successful, the majors will recognize that building such communities creates value and follow suit. Benkler’s own book, published by Yale University Press, is available in PDF form on a website, and he encourages people to translate or digest chapters.

One chapter of Benkler’s book already has been recorded by Michael Scherer, who eventually moved his studio into a monastery for the silence he needed to finish The Federalist Papers. He takes such care with the recordings because he wants to do them as well as he can, building an archive at his own site, americanaphonic.com. “I want to make money,” he says. “But that doesn’t go through my head when I think about what to put up. I try to think of, what do I want people to hear?”

Michael Erard is a writer in Austin, Texas.