Even if half the volunteering recorders and their gear were as good as those of the commercial offerings, just sitting and selecting those that are not good enough for publishing and those that require some re-recording is a massive extra work.
I've listened to a few Librevox recordings. They're usually (though not always) tolerable. Occaisionlly good, but that's exceeding rare.
Good audiobooks -- and a friend listens to many -- are far more often vastly superior. Even then, a poor reader is exceedingly grating.
Libravox may improve with time. History of volunteer efforts has been compeling. But not yet.
I'm impressed by what librivox has achieved with just volunteers, but the production values are nowhere near as high as most books on audible.
IMHO they are just doing injustice to a number of good readers in their catalogue who put real effort into their recordings, but get buried under those one can barely listen to.
There were even these incidents with people ripping the best recordings off LibriVox and selling them on Audible where they ended up achieving high ratings..
However, bad LibriVox experiences were one reason why I didn't truly "get" how superior audiobooks can be for years. Enduring their endless copyright and chapter announcements also hampered the experience a bit.
LibriVox derivatives have now fixed the problem of finding good readers in some of the apps with simple user ratings. I believe a similar project based on WaveNet will make much of LibriVox obsolete soon by being better than many readers there, which saddens me a bit since in principle LibriVox is a good project that simply promoted free sharing of information and knowledge.
Both AI and most of LibriVox have a lot to learn to even come close to the quality of the professional Gert Westphal reading of "The Magic Mountain", or to anything Stephen Fry has read.
No. They are not. I tried listening to Don Quixote Librivox. While a couple of readers are tolerable, several are terrible, and none are close to professional voice actor level. Which makes it really hard to get through. Check out the comments here too if you don't want to subject yourself to listening to the reading itself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLTTJo0E1ag
Audible recordings in general are vastly superior.
Plus all their text is on the public domain.