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Launching Gutenberg Radio - Public Domain Audiobooks
tgbg writes "We are proud to announce the launch of "Gutenberg Radio". On these broadcast channels,
you can hear the Gutenberg Library and anything else the Gutenberg
family cares to share with its public."
You can download some of them. Dracula is a 350 MB mp3 file. The Time Machine is only 50 megs. (It's short. I remember reading that one in just a few hours)
They have lots of public domain movies (anti-communist propaganda from the fifties, old commercials, some documentaties, for example about WWII, etc.)
They started three or four years ago by posting LARGE mpeg2 files (500-700MB); in the meantime they switched to divx and xvid.
they're not recording anything. they're asking you to install the text-to-speech software on your machine and have your machine read it... a feat which most modern OS's can already do out of the box.
e =Downloads& d_op=viewdownload&cid=24
w nloads& d_op=viewdownload&cid=19
actually they have some available for download:
http://www.etc-edu.com/modules.php?nam
also this bootable disk that reads books is also pretty cool:
http://www.etc-edu.com/modules.php?name=Do
alas, because of the bitchslapping they are currently getting from slashdot, i cannot download anything.
-- john
from this link, it seems you can download a bootable cd with the player and a hundred or so books. then you can boot the disc and play the books:
bootable cd
i wouldnt be surprised if you looked around and found a link to the player. alas the site is now dead. check back in a day or so though and i bet you'll find it.
-- john
absloutely incorrect. we are using the eloquence engine, and a set of custom software to markup the text for inflection, etc ...
http://www.archive.org/movies
Many of us are familiar with the works of Robert Jordan. The 9th book in the Wheel of Time series, Winter's Heart, is about 25 hours in length (20 CD's in the unabridged version). A fantastic, first-rate performance.
To produce that, you had to pay the performer for 3.2 working days, and that's just for the bits you actually use. Let's add in the cost of mixing, second takes, plus the time it takes the performers to prepare for the work. You don't simply hand someone a script and expect them to put on a professional production sight unseen, and given the quality of most audiobook productions (and I've listened to many), I can't believe for a second that there's no prep time paid for.
I can easily imagine having to pay each of the performers for three or four weeks work to do this one production, and it very well might be longer considering the size of this book.
You simply can not get the kind of quality that makes for an enjoyable listening experience with a volunteer mom recording WAV files onto her PC with a Compaq built-in-the-monitor microphone.
If you want good-sounding audio, you're going to have to pay for it.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
If you head over to the main Gutenberg Library site and search for "Time Machine" the audio book appears to come up. It would seem that ibiblio has the book on its FTP (and available for download) for at least "Time Machine". If you're looking to get started here's a direct link to the zip.
Sorry but audio books are relatively cheap to produce. First off a full recording studio is massively excessive and totally unnecessary, all you need is a quite room and a quality microphone. You record it directly onto hard disk via a proaudio sound card. Cool Edit 2000, is more than enough to do all the required post production.
Quite rooms are ten a penny, you just need a house in the countryside. In fact more important than a quite room is a room with good accoustics. Ultimately it does not matter if an airplane goes overhead because you can just record it again. In fact you are going to have to record stuff more than once anyway, due to mistakes, coughs etc.
The equipment necessary costs only a few thousand dollars at most, is easy to come by and is already owned by thousands of people around the world.
The only hard bit is finding someone with a good speaking voice. However these are not the reserve of expensive actors.
The actual manufacture of audio books is dirt cheap, the gross profit margins are obscene.
OK, let's get this straight on who invented what and what the chinese were up to in the 1300s.
Gutenberg did not invent the printing press. Presses existed long before him. The chinese did have them. But G, with some of the advanced european knowledge of metallurgy invented little metal characters which could be set and reset for each page. Movable type.
Before movable type, you carved or smelted, one plate per page, fixed. This advance not only lowered the price for printing books, but more importantly lowered the price for various temporary printed works like newspapers and revolutionary pamphlets.
Not to mention that the leftover clothes of all the people who had died during the black death turned out to be a very chap source for low quality paper.
Now in the 1300s, the chinese developed a rice crop which yielded twice a year instead of once. The result, like building Granaries in Civ, was an instant doubling of the food supply and with food surplus comes time to work on other stuff.
During this period of 'Sung industrialization' the chinese had textile mills, and battle fleets, and, of course, printing, or, more accurately, surplus labor to support these things.
Did they decide to stop? No. In a short time, double food lead to double population, and then china was back with its usual population problems and everyone needed to get back to farming.
it's the eloquence engine with a custom front end to mark-up the text for inflection and other parsody factors. the front end went thru 37 releases over a year of testing. we are working with a speech therapist and hope to achieve an "ideal" result by end of summer.
We are now trying to release all our books one year in advance of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing. Please be encouraged to send us error messages even years after the official publication date.
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