Professor at SSU reads and records books for free audio digital library
Sonoma State University anthropology professor Adrian Praetzellis has recorded over 75 hours of materials, including classic books, for LibriVox.org, a free audiobook provider. Praetzellis records from his home office in Santa Rosa.
John Burgess / Press DemocratPublished: Saturday, March 6, 2010 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 2:10 p.m.
By day, Adrian Praetzellis digs, pulling out stories from the detritus the dead have left behind.
By night and on weekends, however, the archaeologist and director of Sonoma State University’s Anthropological Studies Center tells tales of a different sort.
In an attic room tucked into the eaves of his 1870s house near downtown Santa Rosa, Praetzellis reads aloud. No one is there to hear as he intones, in his soothing English accent, everything from great works of literature to children’s works like “The Wind in the Willows” to the Sierra diary of John Muir. His pet project is to pluck out obscure Yiddish fiction deeply buried in archives and otherwise doomed to be seen only by scholars.
His solitary and unpaid exercise in story-telling has reached close to half a million listeners through LibriVox, a free and communally run library of digital audio recordings. The operation was started four years ago by young Montreal techie Hugh McGuire, with the altruistic mission of making as many texts as possible available to a limitless number of people around the world in audio format with no filters, no judgments and no fees. It not only is nonprofit, but has no paid administration.
The only real restriction is that all the texts must be non-copyrighted and in the public domain. In the U.S. that would include anything published before 1923.
Some 3,500 people like Praetzellis have posted recordings — 3,175 books and 65,000 other audio texts ranging from poetry and plays to government documents and important letters and speeches on the site, LibriVox.org.
What gets recorded is up to the whim, tastes and motivations of the volunteers. Some are near professional quality; some are terrible. There is no posted feedback on the site, so as not to inhibit people — including the talented but shy — from trying. But other off-site forums have sprung up to rate the readers and Praetzillis, who has an ear for intonation and inflection along with a bit of a dramatic flair — not to mention that winning “Masterpiece Theater” accent — seems to be a four- and five-star favorite. His rendition of “Treasure Island,” complete with drunken pirates singing, was turned into an iPhone app that has been downloaded 125,000 times.
Knock around the site and you can find such disparate literature as someone reading Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the 9/11 Commission Report, the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
“There’s no quality control,” McGuire said by cell phone from Quebec, where he has a tech start-up, bitesizeedits.com, that connects writers with teams of editors who improve their prose, one sentence at a time.
“Anyone can record. You can be terrible at it,” he said. “As long as your recording conforms to the text it will be accepted. We check everything to make sure it’s audible. There are in the collection a handful of recordings that are pretty close to unlistenable. But the vast majority are very good if not excellent.”
Praetzellis stumbled on his avocation out of desperation. Commuting back and forth to a consulting project in Butte County, he started checking out audio books from the Sonoma County Library to help wile away the monotonous six-hour round-trip commute. Eventually, he had listened to everything in the library he cared to hear. So he started Googling around for free books on the Web and found LibriVox.org.
While it is not the only source for free online books, McGuire maintains it’s the largest digital library of text-based audio recordings.
“There is no other group I know of that is a collaborative group that provides the infrastructure that allows volunteers to make audiobooks,” he said. “I believe we’re the most prolific producer of audiobooks it the world.”
Praetzellis, a bibliophile who has written two archaeological texts cleverly framed as comic mystery adventures and used at universities around the world including UC Berkeley, Stanford and Harvard, was excited by the vast selection. It’s all stored through links at Archive.org, the largest digital library in the world headquartered at San Francisco’s Presidio. He pulls most of his texts from Project Gutenberg, a vast library of more than 30,000 free ebooks with lapsed copyrights.
Seated at his desk before a simple round microphone, Praetzellis so far has recorded 16 books, a disparate selection that runs the gamut from the adventure mystery “The 39 Steps” to Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha” to Kipling’s “Kim.” He has a volunteer editor in the Netherlands who listens for glitches and sound quality.
The bearded Praetzellis, who learned archaeology hands-on as a trade in England before moving to the U.S. and working his way through SSU and a Ph.D. program at Berkeley, confesses to being a bit of a frustrated actor but with no gift for memorizing lines.
“The great thing about this is you can fit it in whenever you want,” he said. “Like I spend maybe a couple of hours a week on it. I can do it in my own time.”
It is a true labor of love. It took him probably 50 hours to read Thomas Hardy’s masterpiece, “Tess of the d’Urbervilles.” He’s now working on “The Blue Lagoon” by H. De Vere Stacpoole and a translation of “Yiddish Tales” by Helena Frank.
He does experiment with different voices and can conjure up some pretty acceptable British regional and class accents as well as Scottish and Irish brogues. But he admits he can’t do “American.”
What the Jewish Praetzellis has mastered well is Yiddish. Disturbed by the anti-Semitism he found in a lot of late 19th and early 20th century literature, including “The 39 Steps,” he became inspired to revive long forgotten Yiddish literature by writers like Israel Zangwill and Amy Levy.
He said he’s drawn to the multi-layered complexity of the writing that can be interpreted in many ways.
“It can by mystical, it can be hilariously funny. It can be very dark,” he said. “It can be religiously profound. It can be revolutionary. A lot of the darkness comes out of the fact that for many of the writers, their childhoods were framed in this folk environment and folk tales are dark, to say the least.”
Recording for LibriVox is, he says, a literal labor of love. Once a recording is made and uploaded, it’s set free for anyone to use in any way they choose, including repackaging it for commercial purposes, like Praetzellis’ popular “Treasure Island.” Recordings are routinely sold on eBay. According to McGuire, the mission of LibriVox is to liberate orphaned literature, not monetize it.
“It’s a very Zen activity and it’s not in keeping with modern society where you make and create and keep for yourself to make a profit,” mused Praetzellis, whose satisfaction comes in the pleasure of reading aloud and the e-mails from grateful truck drivers, commuters and invalids.
“In that way,” he said, “it’s a little like being a graffiti artist.”
You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5204.
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