22 August 2009
LibriVox
I appreciate the heroic efforts of LibriVox to popularize non-English language readings through the Web, but I wish it had spent its time and money on something other than Ursula O. Maderal's poem "Araw ng Kamusmusan." There are better, more critically-acclaimed, more representative poems in Tagalog. In fact, if it can, it would be good for LibriVox to have more Filipino poems read on mp3. The 10 million or so Filipinos that live outside the Philippines should certainly welcome such readings. (I know that LibriVox depends almost completely on volunteers and cannot really choose what its readers read, but there must be a way to encourage more discriminating readers.)
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Might I (as a keen, though largely monolingual LibriVoxer) encourage you yourself, Isagani? As well as your blog readers, of course. LibriVox is ALL about peoples' time ... there's no money involved at any point in the process (unless you count what readers choose to spend on their recording equipment. Most start with whatever they already have or can borrow, though.) We are also completely volunteer-run, there are no paid staff involved at all.
ReplyDeleteIt would be absolutely amazing to have more Tagalog works available in our catalogue, both short works such as poems and stories, and also novels and non-fiction. We are restricted by US law (as that's where files are eventually stored, for free, at archive.org) which means generally works must have been published before 1923. Readers in the Philippines would also need to abide by law there which is Life+50 (authors must have died before 1959.)
That's it, though. The way I see it, we're only really restricted by the number of people who are willing to put their voice into an MP3 file and make it freely available to the world's public domain ... we welcome anyone who's willing to do that!