I did not feel relaxed after this experience - though Mr Gutenberg's collection looked impressive enough at first. Having studied a lot of literature in my original university degree, I thought I would listen to one of my favourite Shakespearean sonnets (no. 116 - Let me not to the marriage of true minds) . I am sure Jane Aker (reader) loves her Shakespeare but if I had listened all the way through, she would have killed him for me. To my ears, it was truly awful! Persevered further with another sonnet (different human voice) and with Coleridge's Kubla Khan with same sorry outcome.
I feel enormously grateful that I am sighted and that this is not my only avenue of access to some of this material. If Gutenberg audio was the only way to get to listen to that work of Charles Dickens you could get hold of in no other way, then OK - but the tones, the misplaced inflections etc of the few things I listened to wouldn't encourage me to back here for any other reason. I recognise how beneficial having this large number of audio-book collections online might be for the blind and vision-impaired, but neither the human nor the computer voices were for me.
Good initiative, but for me, I can really only imagine you'd need to have no other way at all to access some of these books . . .
1 comment:
We are just about to include mp3files into our catalogue, but they are more recent audiobook files. (and they are paid for so the quality and suitablility of the reader is far better)
It will be interesting to see who they are used by.
Almost to the end...
Lynette
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