Help for Listeners in China
We have recently (March - April 2010) received many reports that listeners in China are unable to access any of our completed audio recordings.
The reason for this appears to be that the government of China has blocked access to the Internet Archive, which hosts the files of all our completed recordings. See the Wikipedia article on the Golden Shield Project for more details. The reason for this is known only to the Chinese government, but is likely to be because there are items on the Internet Archive which they consider to be subversive, and they therefore prevent anyone in China from accessing anything on the entire domain, including our recordings.
What can LibriVox do about this?
Not very much, unfortunately. The Internet Archive generously hosts our recordings free, and we cannot pay the large storage and bandwidth costs to host them on a commercial service.
Some of our recordings are also available on Project Gutenberg, which may be accessible in China.
A small number of our recordings are also available via Legal Torrents.
We will try to increase the number of recordings available in these ways, but it is never likely that the whole catalogue (now over 3000 recordings) will become available through these alternative methods.
What can the listener do?
- Try Project Gutenberg. Some of our audiobooks are there. This link leads to a page where you can browse all human-read audio books, available in various formats (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, M4b Apple iTunes). The interface is not very helpful, but at least the files are available for download.
- Try an online web-storage space that can grab files from a remote server e.g. ADrive.com. Detailed instructions to follow.
- Try LegalTorrents Detailed instructions to follow. Unfortunately this does not appear to be working at the moment.
