Free Audiobooks on LibriVox Have RSS Feeds

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 09:25:47 GMT

Cover of the October 1958 issue of Amazing Stories magazine, which includes the novel This Crowded Earth by Robert Bloch. The cover depicts the story The Delegate From Venus and shows what appears to be a group of leaders at an organization such as the United Nations. Nameplates indicate that one man represents the U.S.S.R., another Japan and a third Denmark. In the foreground a robotic figure sits at a microphone before the nameplate Venus. The cover has this text: Amazing Science Fiction Stories: This Crowded Earth, novel by Robert Block. The Quantum Jump. The Delegate from Venus. October 1958. 35 cents

The free audiobook service LibriVox, which has volunteers narrating thousands of books in the public domain, offers an RSS feed for each book. Here's the RSS feed for This Crowded Earth, a 1958 science fiction novel by Robert Bloch: https://librivox.org/rss/2921

There's an item element in the feed for each chapter with an enclosure containing the audio of that chapter. Add the feed's URL to podcasting software to listen to the book as a podcast.

The book feeds are valid RSS but we have one suggestion for an improvement. The feeds could work in a wider range of podcast clients if there was a guid element in each item such as this:

<guid isPermaLink="false">thiscrowdedearth_01_bloch_64kb.mp3</guid>

This guid uses the filename of a chapter as the unique value. When there's no guid RSS readers look at the item's link for a possible unique identifier, but these feeds use the book's URL in every item.

Categories: RSS, RSS Guid, Podcasting, Audiobooks

2025/07/07 · Link