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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."
absloutely incorrect. we are using the eloquence engine, and a set of custom software to markup the text for inflection, etc ...
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.