Audio versions of articles from The New Yorker, The Atlantic and more

June 11, 2006 5:44 PM

Assistive Media is a non-profit organization dedicated to offering audio access to literary works for the blind. They have placed an extensive archive of downloadable magazine articles in mp3 format online, including selections from The New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic and American Heritage.
posted by huskerdont (13 comments total)

wonderful : >

and i'll add that Project Gutenberg has audio books online too
posted by amberglow at 5:54 PM on June 11, 2006

Also see BookShare for over 27,445 books available in DAISY, BRF or HTML format for people with documented print disabilities.
posted by Soliloquy at 6:28 PM on June 11, 2006

They could make a boatload of money off of this if they just reframed their content from "assistive media" to the more memeish "podcast."
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:56 PM on June 11, 2006 [1 favorite]

also see Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic

"Anne T. Macdonald was a member of the New York Public Library's Women's Auxiliary in 1948 when the letters started to arrive — letters from soldiers who had lost their sight in combat during World War II."

I've been to their offices in Chicago, and would love to be able to improve the software and process they use. I was surprised that their recording format requires special hardware for playback. The current state of technology should allow them to distribute recordings without any special requirements for hardware.
posted by bleary at 7:01 PM on June 11, 2006

Very nice. Thanks for the link.
posted by JPowers at 9:33 PM on June 11, 2006

Huskerdont, Excellent post. Thank you so much. Amberglow and Soliloquy, what marvelous resources.

I love to hear things read. What a treat.
posted by nickyskye at 10:28 PM on June 11, 2006

Thank you for this.
posted by interrobang at 11:09 PM on June 11, 2006

Just thought of sending this the Assistive Media link to a dear friend who is visually impaired, she's gonna love it!
posted by nickyskye at 11:20 PM on June 11, 2006

Thanks for the great link, huskerdont!

I recently discovered
brief description of the site:

"LibriVox: free audiobooks
LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (podcast and catalog). Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project. "

I have already listened to "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen from the site, and am happy to report that the sound quality, and the reading of the volunteers was excellent.
posted by eclectica at 6:42 AM on June 12, 2006 [1 favorite]

sorry, the link didn't post above
posted by eclectica at 6:44 AM on June 12, 2006

the link feature isn't working for me, so here is the URL for Librivox:

http://librivox.org/
posted by eclectica at 6:45 AM on June 12, 2006

great stuff. thanks for this.
posted by the cuban at 6:57 AM on June 12, 2006

There are indeed podcast feeds for all the pages on the Assistive Media site, but we haven't quite finished connecting everything yet. You can pick up the main feed right now at http://feeds.feedburner.com/AssistiveMedia and put that into your favorite podcast client.
posted by edwardvielmetti at 8:29 PM on June 12, 2006