Librivox.org houses an active community of volunteers that read and record books that are out of copyright and releases the audio recordings into the public domain, for free.
The quality of the recordings is generally high, but with thousands of books completed it can be hard to tell where to start if you are a listener who wants to find the best books and the best recordings. The librivox.org website is aimed primarily at the volunteers and doesn't allow any way to rate or rank the recordings.
Audio Zero allows easy searching of the audio files and also lets you bookmark, rate and comment on them in a minimal, beautiful interface. Web 2.0 goodness!
Librivox API integration
Librivox supplies a search API that returns results in an xml format, and by writing a fairly simple parser and using the form api I was able to import the books to a content type created with CCK. A cron job regularly imports the most recent new releases.
Playback and download
The audio files themselves remain on archive.org so our bandwidth is reasonable, and as well as offering a .zip download for each book we use jplayer to enable playing in-browser.
Amazon API integration
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