Kara Shallenberg records audio books -- most recently the Frances Hodgson Burnett classic "A Little Princess" -- that can be downloaded from the Internet.
A stay-at-home mom in Oceanside, she is not a professional reader, let alone one of the highly regarded actors such as Jim Dale, Ruby Dee and Michael York who have infused audio books with compelling, nuanced performances.
But Shallenberg's recordings are free, unlike the professionally done audio books, which can cost $20 to $50 to download.
Shallenberg is one of a rapidly growing number of volunteers who are making recordings of public-domain books that can be copied from the Internet at no cost.
Free books read by amateurs are among the latest uses of podcasting, whereby recordings are easily made on computers and sent out over the Internet for downloading to other computers and portable players.
The most prominent site for the free book downloads, www.librivox.org, debuted in August. LibriVox has 15 unabridged novels available, including Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island," Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Notes From the Underground," Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," P.G. Wodehouse's "Smith in the City" and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein."
Also available are readings of short stories, poems and documents such as the U.S. Constitution. The all-volunteer site also lists more than 100 works in progress.
LibriVox is the brainchild of Hugh McGuire, an unpublished novelist in Montreal. He was listening to a commercial recording of D.H. Lawrence's novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover" when he came up with the idea of using the Internet's wide reach to record and distribute books.
Key to his plan was a way to get books recorded efficiently. As a former engineer, McGuire, 31, was familiar with the concept of freely circulated, open-source software that a number of people could work on simultaneously. "My idea was that a book could be divided so that a number of people around the world could work on it, each one recording a chapter," McGuire said.
The first project was "The Secret Agent," Joseph Conrad's 1907 tale of a spy who infiltrates an anarchist group in London. Although fairly short as novels go, it has more than 91,000 words. McGuire divided its 13 chapters among himself and 11 readers he met through literary and other websites.
"If it had been done by one reader it could take weeks," he said. "This way, it takes just days."
