Last weekend Clansi and I drove down to Geelong for a Conference on Science and Christianity, and my clever wife had the idea that an audio book might be a fun way to stay entertained in the car. She found a recently produced recording of “The Horse and His Boy” at the library, and it really was a fantastic way to enjoy the hours of driving.

I have never fully enjoyed listening to music while travelling in cars, because my brain ends up fighting to differentiate between the road noise and the recording. Speech, I have found, is much simpler to detect and thus more enjoyable while on the road. Having a flow of words to interpret also helps keep the brain active, which I strongly suspect diminishes the dangers of fatigue.

My recent “discovery” of audio books led me on a search to find whether this medium has been liberated by Free Culture, as Flickr did for photos and Wikipedia did for encycopaedic knowledge. I discovered LibriVox, which is a volunteer-driven project that aims to make all public domain books available as audio recordings. It is essentially a Project Gutenberg for audio books.

Naturally, some of the volunteers recording have better “reading voices” than others, but there are some LibriVox recordings which are very professional indeed. I might even contribute some time – it would be good motivation to practise dramatic skills.

I have already found half a dozen good LibriVox recordings that I’d like to listen to some time – but there are still a number of audio books in the library that Clansi and I want to hear. Maybe we’ll have to plan a road trip just to catch up!