LibriVox Guide

A guide for Jaws users, written by Chorlton Workshop for hsbp.

Introduction

This is a guide for the LibriVox website, which can be found at www.librivox.org.

LibriVox is a completely voluntary organisation which makes audio recordings of books which are in the public domain, and then makes them available for free. Since the web server which LibriVox uses is in the USA, books are in the public domain if they were published in the USA before 1923. LibriVox was started in August 2005, and their completely crazy aim is to record all the books in the public domain.

The books available include novels, poetry and non-fiction. Some of the books are read by a single person, others have chapters read by different people.

The recordings can be downloaded in a number of ways, including as podcasts and bit torrents, but this guide only covers using the standard download facility of your web browser. You can download either individual chapters or an entire book. The guide includes instructions both for Internet Explorer and Firefox running under Windows XP

The recordings are all available in mp3 format, and so you can use Windows Media Player, or another media player to listen to them. Note that RealPlayer often cuts off the last few seconds of the recordings.

The remaining sections of the guide are as follows:

Page structure

This is the overall structure of the pages on the LibriVox website:

LibriVox Catalog

In the LibriVox catalog, each book has its own web page, and we'll call these pages book pages. This section describes how to navigate the catalog to find a book page, from where you can download individual chapters or the entire book.

To get to the LibriVox catalog from any page on the website do one of the following:

There's also a link to the LibriVox catalog near the beginning of the main content on the home page of the website.

Catalog page

The title of the LibriVox catalog page is LibriVox » LibriVox Catalog, and the level 2 heading at the start of the content section is The LibriVox Catalog.

In the content section there's a level 3 heading “ Use the following links to browse through the sub-sections”. Following this, there's a numbered list of sub-sections of the catalog, and the first six contain completed works which you can download. Open one of these links to go to a catalog sub-section page.

Catalog sub-section page

The structure of all the pages containing sub-sections are similar, so we'll use the Completed Books page as an example. The title of the page is LibriVox » Completed Books, and the level 2 heading of the the content section is Completed Books.

There's a list of links to the individual books. The text for each link is the author's name followed by the title, and the links are sorted alphabetically by the surname of the author. Open any of the links, and you are taken to a book page, which is described in the next section.

Book page

The title of a book page is “LibriVox » book title, book author”, and the level 2 heading of the content section is the book title.

This is an overview of the main content:

Downloading a chapter

On a book page:

  1. Move to the list of chapters, which is the second list on the page, and immediately follows the text “mp3 and ogg files”.
  2. Each item in the list consists of the chapter name, followed by three links to audio files for the chapter which are in different formats or sound quality. To move through the chapters it's useful to use the quick navigation key I, to move through the items in the list ( assuming you have a recent version of jaws ). Find the chapter which you want to listen to.
  3. It's normally best to use the first audio file — the reasons are given at the end of the section. To open an audio file with your default mp3 player, just open the link. If you're using the Firefox browser, a dialog asks whether you want to open or save the file. The default is open, so you can just press ENTER.
  4. The download of the audio file to a temporary folder on your computer starts, and a dialog opens which tells you the progress of the download. When this is complete, your default mp3 player automatically starts playing the audio file. If the download is going to take a while, you can use the computer for something else while you're waiting — you'll know when the download is finished, because the audio file will start playing.
  5. As noted above, the mp3 file is downloaded to a temporary folder on your computer. If you want to keep a permanent copy, and you're using Windows Media Player, you can save the mp3 file by choosing Save Media as... from the File menu.

Choice of audio file

This section just gives the reasons for using the first of the three audio files, so just skip it if you're not interested. The first two audio files are in the mp3 format and the third in the ogg orbis format. Mp3 is the more common format, and you'll be able to listen to the file using either Windows Media Player, or any other media player that you've installed on your computer (for example RealPlayer). The digitisation rates of the two mp3 files are 64 kilo bits per second (kbps) and 128 kbps respectively. Sound quality and file size increase with the number of kbps, but for speech 64kbps is fine.

Downloading a book

LibriVox provides a Zip file containing the mp3 files for all the chapters in the book. The file has the extension .zip. The following two sections describe how to download the file using Internet Explorer and Firefox. After these there's a section on how to listen to the book.

Using Internet Explorer

On a book page:

  1. Find the link “Zip file of the entire book” — you can use the links list dialog to move to the link (INSERT + F7).
  2. Open the shortcut menu for the link, and choose “Save Target As...”.
  3. A Save As dialog opens. The file name will be “book name”_librivox_64kb_mp3.zip. To save the file in your My Documents folder: press ALT + I to open the Save In combo box; press the letter M a number of times till you select My Documents; press TAB to close the combo box, and then press ENTER for the default button, which is Save. For more details on the Save As dialog, including how to save to other folders, see the separate guide on the Open and Save As Dialogs.
  4. A dialog opens, which has the title x% of “file name”, where x is the percentage of the file that has already been downloaded. The file will probably take a while to download. You can do something else, and then switch programs back to the dialog (ALT + TAB) to check the progress.
  5. When the download is complete, the title of the dialog changes to Download complete. Press ENTER to close the dialog.

Using Firefox

On a book page:

  1. Find the link “Zip file of the entire book” — you can use the links list dialog to move to the link (INSERT + F7).
  2. Open the shortcut menu for the link, and choose “Save Link As...”.
  3. A Save As dialog opens. The file name will be “book name”_librivox_64kb_mp3.zip. To save the file in your My Documents folder: press ALT + I to open the Save In combo box; press the letter M a number of times till you select My Documents; press TAB to close the combo box, and then press ENTER for the default button, which is Save. For more details on the Save As dialog, including how to save to other folders, see the separate guide on the Open and Save As Dialogs.
  4. A dialog opens, which has the title x% of 1 file - Downloads, where x is the percentage of the file that has already been downloaded. The file will probably take a while to download. You can do something else, and then switch programs back to the dialog (ALT + TAB) to check the progress.
  5. When the download is complete, the title of the dialog changes to Downloads. Press ESC to close the dialog.

Listening to the book

Windows XP treats a Zip file as a special type of folder — a compressed (zipped) folder. So in Windows Explorer, a zipped folder can appear in the tree view of the folders and disks.

Sometimes it's necessary to extract the files from a zipped folder before they can be used, but to listen to the mp3 files in a zipped folder, you don't need to do this. Here are a couple of ways of using Windows Explorer to navigate to the mp3 files:

Select the mp3 file you want to listen to, and press ENTER to open it. A File Download dialog asking you whether you want to open the file may open. If it does, the default is Cancel, so you have to TAB to the Open button and press it. Your default mp3 player opens and starts playing the file.

Mp3 player keystrokes

Below are some useful keystrokes for both Windows Media Player and RealPlayer for listening to mp3 files. As noted in the introduction, RealPlayer often cuts off the last few seconds of recordings.

Windows Media Player

Command Keystroke
Play or pause CTRL + P
Stop CTRL + S
Volume down F9
Volume up F10
Fast forward CTRL+ SHIFT + F

RealPlayer

Command Keystroke
Play or pause CTRL + P
Stop CTRL + S
Volume down CTRL + DOWN ARROW
Volume up CTRL + UP ARROW
Fast forward CTRL + RIGHT ARROW
Rewind CTRL + LEFT ARROW