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Do you use an ereader or have a good TTS system that doesn't sound like a stuttering robot? I want to read more prohibited books or books that would land me on a list, but without that last part and it seems digital consumption is the only decent way to do that.
Also, just public domain books broadly. Public domain is the best and IP is the worst
For the "doesnât sound like a stuttering robot + stays off any listsâ problem, local/on-device is the way to go: e.g. tools built around Kokoro (the small open neural model) are currently the sweet spot: natural enough for actual books, runs entirely in the browser or on your machine with no uploads, and you can export the audio if you want. A few browser extensions do exactly this offline after a one-time model download.
I use Calibre and it just added proper Kokoro support for its read aloud feature, which is nice if youâre already managing your ebooks there.
I also made one myself for personal use: outside of the Monero-related side of things I mostly live in "I make my own stuff on demand as I like them" mode :) Cloned a voice I wanted, it reads my articles now, and I made sure it doesnât track me either :)) If you have access/subscription to a decent model you can literally have almost anything on demand (I do that all the time when it's not related to the darker/Monero side of my life :)
And yeah, public domain is the best. IP is the worst.
Knowledge should be free!
Excited you mentioned Aozora Bunko! đ¸đ
I use Wikimedia Commons a lot to hunt for illustrations for my newsletter (or rather, the newsletter is mostly just an excuse to spend time on art discovery lol).
A few big places I like that werenât in your original post:
LibriVox https://librivox.org/ (public-domain audiobooks read by humans)
Standard Ebooks https://standardebooks.org/ (nicely formatted public-domain books)
Internet Archive https://archive.org/
Wikisource https://en.wikisource.org/
IMSLP (huge sheet music collection; many recordings too) https://imslp.org/
Chronicling America (US historical newspapers) https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
I have countless lists with niche (sounds, vector, etc.) and regional sources, not gonna post them all here because when a list gets too long it becomes useless đ. If youâre looking for a rec for a specific thing, Iâll be happy to share :)