Librivox Audio Version of Dracula

Image by Aijalyn Kohler

I just realized that when I wrote my review of Dracula, I only mentioned the Norton Critical Edition. I don't know why as I'd intended to write on the Dracula recording I got from Librivox. This reading, I hopscotched between audio and paperback.

The quality of the recording is exceptional. The readers worked together so that each narrator has a different reader--not just the main narrators but also the writers of notes and newspaper articles. The audio on the Jonathan Harker sections is slightly off, but still good, and everything else is up to professional standards. I was amazed!

By the way, if you listen to audio books at all, you really need to go visit the Librivox site. They "only" record out of copyright stuff, but that covers a lot of excellent literature.

It's not only in English, either. It looks like most of the stuff is in English, but I've run across German titles and, according to their FAQ

We have complete works in more than twenty languages, including German, French, Spanish, Dutch and Italian. The multilingual collections have many shorter contributions in even more languages. All we need is willing volunteers who are fluent in the language they'd like to record. Post in Book Suggestions if you want to recruit a team to work on a book in a particular language.

There are other free audio sites out there, but so far, the ones I've checked have all ended up linking back to Librivox for the books I was interested in. That may change over time, of course, though I do think it only sensible of them to crosslink.