Show HN: Searchable library of free audiobooks

The discover part at least seems to work acceptably. Stumbled across the Lang's Fairy Books from the late 1800's and early 1900's that collected ~800 stories and 150 poem about mythology, folklore, and fairy tales from all over the Earth. Never knew they existed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Langs%27_Fairy_Books

From WP though: 'authors, including E. Nesbit, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle, were influenced by the Langs' books. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote that "In English none probably rival either the popularity, or the inclusiveness, or the general merits of the twelve books of twelve colours which we owe to Andrew Lang and to his wife."

Actually had a somewhat of tale of their own in publishing.

'Although Andrew is often credited with selecting the stories in the Fairy Books, most of the work was done by Nora. Nora and a team of other writers, who were mostly women and included May Kendall and Violet Hunt, translated these into English and adapted them to suit Victorian and Edwardian notions of propriety. However, as Andrew acknowledges in a preface to The Lilac Fairy Book (1910), "The fairy books have been almost wholly the work of Mrs. Lang, who has translated and adapted them from the French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, and other languages."'

Please add a column whether it is an actual recording of a human voice or AI generated.

I will definitely be using this. However it is missing some data. For example, filtering on author: aquinas yields nothing, but see https://librivox.org/author/1199?primary_key=1199&search_cat...

The big thing I want in a book repository is a hierarchical list which will allow browsing by subject.

One site which does work well for this (for textual books) and which is well-regarded is:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/subjects.html

which uses the LoC identifier for a given text.

A project which past me wanted for future me was to read one book from each LoC category, and then to repeat that for sub-categories --- young me did that for the Dewey Decimal system for the high school library, but there were a number of gaps in the collection, and at that time, I didn't have the discipline or resources to make note of them so as to source books from other book repositories.

Could I search on language? Want to see what the Japanese options are.

I'm not sure if it is your issue or not, but when I searched for "red planet" your index entry says it's the Robert A. Heinlein novel, but the link to Librivox goes to the page for the William John Locke book.

Congrats on launching :)

I suggest you add a 'detail' view so that:

- each book has its own URL (which can be shared), and

- mobile users can easily see the external links (which are hard to see in a list view on a narrow screen)

Can't seem to click any of the books.

A few of the librivox Hugh Lofting Dr Dolittle readings arent picked up (post office, zoo)

Are the ratings for the books, or for the recordings?

The one book listed by Asimov links to a book of the same name by a different author.

Count of Monte Cristo is in there, highly recommended!