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Escape Pod (Sci-Fi/Fantasy) http://www.escapepod.info/

PodioBooks (various) http://www.podiobooks.com/

LibriVox (books in the public domain) http://librivox.org/

Another way to support independant sci-fi is to listen to Escape Pod, the weekly science-fiction podcast magazine.

I'm not involved in this project, but I have been a frequent donor. I think EP is a very important project. To some extent, the sci-fi and fantasy genres are dominated by the feature film, the novel and the long-running series. The traditional vehicle for short stories, magazines, have a dwindling readership, and do not have the distribution that they once had at their peak.

EP seeks to create an audience, and perhaps one day a market for short, original science-fiction stories. I think this is a very noble and important cause.

Please tune in. I hope you enjoy it. You can find it listed on all good podcast directories.

I produce a short fiction podcast called Escape Pod. We buy science fiction and fantasy stories from authors, narrate them, and release them on the Web. Our authors receive a real contract for nonexclusive audio rights, and get a real check. Our listeners get free content. We release our MP3 files under a Creative Commons license. (Attribution/non-commercial/no-derivatives.)

In turn we ask for donations. Within three months, we were bringing in more money in donations than we had paid for stories. We're putting that money back into the podcast.

My choice to use a CC license was not based on any sort of idealism or geek philosophy. It was a business decision: I wanted the audio files to be distributed as widely as possible, to grow our audience and our donor base as large as possible. CC is a useful shorthand to encourage that sharing while making it clear that people can't alter the content (our authors still have copyright) and they can't sell it without our involvement.

It's impractical to charge money for a podcast, and I don't intend to try. Giving it away and asking for money, however, has worked out very well for us. Creative Commons doesn't make that possible, but it facilitates it. It makes my life easier by not forcing me to write the necessary legal boilerplate on my own, and by allowing me to communicate our terms in a few phrases that many people understand.

So that's how CC has been useful to me. No "theory of art" or any such fluff: it's just about putting out content that people enjoy, and finding a way to make back what we put into it.

A lot of directories offer ratings by review score or by popularity. My personal favorite are the Podcast Pickle listings.

And podcasts aren't all just two people chatting at each other; you can find quite a lot of variety if you look. My own podcast narrates short science fiction. Like audiobooks, but shorter.

It is a good novel, but it's just concluded. Podcast Clients (or PodCatchers, if you're a buzzword junkie) download from last to first which disrupts the flow of a serialised story. Individual Short Stories, like those presented in Steve Eleys Escape Pod are better suited than serials. They can be presented both individually, or in a serial.

Getting back to Earthcore; It's exciting, enthralling and free. Would I purchase the Book (which he is selling pre-orders for ATM)? Maybe, but I wouldn't read it again. I would only purchase it to support the Author. His Technical Background is rather flakey at best, a few hours of research could've made is Metallurgical and Geological explanations more consistant.

Earthcore was a good way to pass the time, and non-tech-geek may get a kick out of it, but anyone who knows much about anything specific will be let down time and time again by his Inconsistent Technical explainations.

If you're interested in science fiction or fantasy, you should check out Escape Pod. We podcast fun short stories each week, with some flash fiction bonuses and the occasional review, and it's all free.

http://podiobooks.com/ -- several audio books
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1 -- Audio books including Sherlock Holmes
http://escapepod.info/ -- Sci-Fi