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Although this report focuses on digital audiobook systems and services that libraries and library consortia may purchase or lease, there are also many free online sources of digital audiobooks. A few of these sources are listed below. Integrating these free resources and services into a library's organizational mission is challenging and may prove to be more labor-intensive than a purchase or lease system. Most of the available titles in these master collections are older works in the public domain in the United States. Each library needs to assess its user community to determine the probable demand for these services.
LibriVox
www.librivox.org
The Internet Archive
www.archive.org.
ibiblio
www.ibiblio.arg
LibriVox
This not-for-profit, distributed-volunteer effort is dedicated, as its organizational slogan attests, to the "acoustical liberation of books in the public domain." LibriVox describes itself as a completely volunteer-driven organization dedicated to providing open source, ad-free, free-of-charge public-domain audiobooks.15
As of early November 2006, LibriVox had a catalog of 342 completed audio recordings. Because that catalog includes two or more recordings of several titles (e.g., The Velveteen Rabbit, The Wind in the Willows), the number of unique titles is a little smaller. Some of the...