Grace Buchanan Audiobooks — Let's Build Bridges Together — renovating

Chapter One read by Grace Buchanan for LibriVox.

Listen to the entire book at Internet Archive. I recorded Chapters One and Two.

Read the entire book at Project Gutenberg.

Listen to all the work that I’ve done for LIbriVox

This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit: librivox.org.

Image credit:
This original book cover c. 1878 is in the public domain.

I wish that copyright law offered longer-lasting protection for artists. After all, when a person owns physical property, they can control how that passes down to their heirs. Conversely, authors and their heirs only own the stories for a limited time, and then anyone can reproduce and sell them however they’d like without permission from the creator or anyone else.

As stated in the Author’s Note at the beginning of this book, someone published Mrs. Burnett’s work without her permission, and in a way that she didn’t like.

I feel bad when I record books like this one that are in the public domain. The authors and their heirs don’t grant me permission to interpret and record the story the way that I choose to tell it. My intention is to uncover and express the artist’s intent, but I could be way off. I could even sell my recordings and make money without compensating the author’s loved ones for the time and effort that she put into creating the characters and scenarios. At least my recordings are added to the public domain catalog where I sourced the writings, but it still doesn’t feel right.

So then, why is my blog only protected by a Creative Commons license? Because I benefit from images that Creative Commons licensees make available. Choosing a Creative Commons license is my way of giving back to the Creative Commons community.

What do you think?