Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection: The 200 Best Inventions of 2023 (original) (raw)

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By Chris Stokel-Walker

October 24, 2023 7:00 AM EDT

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Project Gutenberg is the oldest digital library, started in 1971 to make e-books more accessible. But CEO Greg Newby says it “isn’t great at either creating or distributing.” So Microsoft and MIT teamed up to make the Open Audiobook Collection, using text-to-speech tech to turn 5,000 books into free, synthetically narrated audiobooks, now available on Spotify. The software fueling the project was also released at no charge.

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