While you say "a dump of audiobooks", it is certainly not that for the readers who put in a considerable amount of work for each and every title. And it is certainly not that for the listeners who can listen to books not otherwise available.

I don't think reading or listening to books at random (or based on average community score) makes sense. If you pick books based on trustworthy recommendations, most problems go away. Then just see where that book is available; if it is on Librivox and it's good enough, great. If not, get a commercial edition or a hard copy.

I've only listened to a single audiobook from Librivox. It was a book that has no commercial counterpart. The quality was mediocre but I was really happy to be able to listen to that specific book. On the other hand, I had to stop listening to another commercially produced book (that I also wanted to listen to) because I couldn't stand the narrator, so I do see your point of view.

Otherwise, uh, it’s free. Take a listen, if it works, keep it. If not, drop it. Conundrum solved.

I love audiobooks, but honestly don't see an easy way to interface with this site

Then just don't use it at all. Go buy a sub to Audible.

If you want a place to start, I can recommend the recordings by Mark Nelson - https://librivox.org/reader/251

He recorded a lot of pulp classics - "The Cosmic Computer", "First Lensman", "Hour of the Dragon", "Princess of Mars", "Space Viking". Professional quality recording, great voice, charming books.

Pretty much.

It can be pretty annoying when a book has multiple narrators as the quality can vary significantly, so you might get deep into a book before you start getting consistently bad narrators.

I can't remember the book now, but it put me off using LibriVox forever.

Now I try the local library app or the app from the local library where I used to live and if that fails there is always audible.

I think one of the most annoying experiences I had was when they changed narrators in the third book of the Takeshi Kovacs series. It wasn't even that the third narrator was bad, especially, just that he sounded wrong—but I was far too invested to set it aside at that point.

Pretty much download, listen, move on. But after a few, you might start recognising the reader, and have confidence in them. (It's been a while for me since I made heavy use of Librivox, so I've forgotten the ones I preferred.)

Narration is a personal preference, but I've found many of the narrations are pretty good. Even compared to paid ones.

I work in a laboratory where I can go hours without the ability to even touch my phone to turn something on or off, or change volumes. So far, I've only been terminally annoyed to the point I turned it off, despite wearing acid contaminated gloves. For me, that's a pretty good track record.