I’ve always been skeptical about the audiobook format. Being conservative in nature, I always preferred the good old feeling of a paper book in my hands. You know, the tactile feeling of turning pages, the smell of the paper, and all that good stuff.
The thing is, over the years, my schedule got busier and busier, and I started to have less and less time for out-of-work activities. Unfortunately, among other things, casual reading also kept getting pushed further and further down the priority list.
At this point, I’ve had a constant nagging feeling that I’m missing out on some good sci-fi stories, and around December last year, I finally decided to lax my stubbornness a bit.
To quote Mark Twain’s adaptation of Plato’s saying: “Necessity is the mother of taking chances.” And so I did.
I deployed an audiobookshelf instance on my homelab. Moved my podcast subscriptions from AntennaPod to it, and started digging the interwebs for some good sources of books that I’m particularly interested in.
Given the growing monopoly, and extortionist terms and licenses of audible (read amazon), I decided that I’ll stay as far from it as I can. I’ll try to purchase audiobooks from the authors directly if possible, if not, then I guess I’ll skip, and look for other titles.
With the above said, it is very important to appreciate projects like LibriVox. It is entirely based on contributions of volunteers, and all recordings are in the public domain. At the time of writing, it has over 20k titles, which pretty much guarantees that anyone can find something for their taste.
I’ve already found some great titles from authors like Asimov, or H. G. Wells.
Pretty much since December of last year, I’ve completed 8 books, and I must admit, I’m really glad I decided to give this format a try. It is an ideal pastime when commuting, and in general, when your hands and eyes are busy with something else.
Soo, I’m happy to report that the experiment went quite well, and I’d certainly recommend it to anyone with a busy schedule.
Cheers!