Show HN: An Audible alternative for classic audiobooks
soundreads.ioI spent the last 1yr+ building an audiobook streaming service that focuses on timeless classic works in the public domain.
One thing I'm especially proud of is the restoration I did on the "War of the Worlds" 1938 Radio broadcast. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I've made it temporarily free (no login required or anything untoward) to listen to [1] in case anyone is curious. You should compare it with the original [2] and let me know what you think. I find the actual broadcast super engaging and enjoyable.
I've done everything from building the app to the audio engineering. A lot of learning involved as my background is on the software side, not marketing, audio engineering, etc.
A lot of the initial catalog is stuff that I've sourced from Librivox [3] (legends), but I've done a lot of curation, clean up, editing, mastering, and packaging to make it more enjoyable. There's also some original audiobooks too, and more should be landing each month (they're expensive and time consuming to produce with real humans and AI isn't quite there yet IMHO).
It's at a point now where I think it's ready enough to release it to the public.
I'd love any constructive feedback (audio quality, UX, concept, etc) that anyone would be willing to provide. Finally, some of the things that are unique:
1) Subscribers vote on what content we produce next (new content monthly is the plan). 2) 3 referrals = a free subscription 3) A "lifetime" option (possibly naive, but it's what I want as a consumer)
Anyways, if you even read to this point I appreciate it!
[1] https://app.soundreads.io/discover/item/war-of-the-worlds
[2] https://archive.org/details/WarOfTheWorlds1938RadioBroadcast...
[3] https://librivox.org/ Congrats on the release! How large is the current library and at what rate do you expect to add new books? What books are subscribers voting on? Thank you, and thanks for the comment! Currently I have around 20 books with plans on releasing 1 a month (hopefully more). Have several in production right now and several in the bag ready to release over the first several months. I literally just went live with some podcast adverts a week ago, so I only have 2 subscribers thus far :) so not much in the way of voting. It’s also limited to a preselected set of books (https://www.soundreads.io/voting). If you’re interested in giving me any feedback on the selection, quality and app, I’d be happy to give you a 6mo trial (I can figure out a way of doing it that doesn’t require a CC or anything). Thanks again for the comment.