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Creative Commons Audiobooks
xanderwilson writes "The New York Times (2nd half of the article; free reg. required as always) writes, 'Project Gutenberg is well known for offering free electronic versions of famous public-domain texts. Now Telltale Weekly wants to be its audio-book equivalent.' Of interest to others in the Slashdot community: Ogg Vorbis and MP3 downloads, payment via Bitpass micropayments, and a cheap-now, free later (with a Creative Commons License) business model." (And if you buy the Ogg Vorbis versions, part of the money goes to xiph.org.)
What a neat idea, I've been looking for some portable culture for my daily commute. But putting the full text of a book on my iPod is tedious (limit on Note size), not to mention really annoying to read, and impossible to do while driving.
It's cheap and has no DRM, so if it's also decent quality, sign me up.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
what the f&*^#$ is ogg? Some stupid linux invention?
From their site: "Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source." In other words, it has better compression than mp3, and since it's open source, you don't have to pay licensing fees on players that decode Ogg like you would with mp3.
-- BSD or Bust
Time to look into getting 4Mbps internet and upgrade the 120G hard disk to make room for the War and Peace mp3.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I want to see them get public domain songs up there too... if the RIAA hasn't filed a motion against that -- are there even public domain songs anymore?
stuff |
Five years or 100,000 paid downloads whichever comes first... yes I can support that model. Why the heck can't the RIAA or MPAA get with it??? nah, they've got to keep milking the cash cow for as long as they possible can... why else is stuff like Pink Floyd or Led Zepp's back catalogue so expensive still some thirty years after first release???
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I fail to see how this is analogous to the Gutenburg Project. Firstly, the Gutenburg Project has free books, with a wealth of literature there for all.
This project, is not free, thought it is cheap, but does it have the depth of literature behind it? Audiobooks are relatively new compared to normal books, is there such a great selection and wealth of information/literature out there to warrant a community project such as this?
Along these lines, I assembled a streaming version of Lessig's new book "Free Culture", with contributed readings by assorted folks...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Reg Free Link. Enjoy!
AC
Because that music is still better than 99.9999% of the music released in the thirty years prior. Thats sort of like asking why a 67 caddy is more expensive used today then when it was first sold.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
If I had the free time available, I would so love to "make" an audiobook reading an older public domain work or something... too bad I don't have anything in the way of good enough sound equipment for it.
That would be a good way of making older or more obscure works of literature available to the blind or anyone who wants to enjoy them on the go, with volunteer readers narrating the texts. Of course they'd need to be screened for quality, but I think something like that would be feasible. The fees could pretty much be cheap enough to just cover the costs of bandwidth and hosting.
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
Text-to-speech technology is no substitute for an audio book. Audiobooks are read by humans. Humans use slightly different voices for different characters, and infuse their voices with emotion. Some audiobooks are dramatized, with different readers for each character.
Would you take the script of a play or a movie, run it through tts and then say it was even a passable substitute for the original?
From Telltale A Modest Proposal Swift, 18m 21s) costs 75 cents. That's 4.15cents a minute.
Of course, you don't have the DRM crap you get with audible, or the subscription stuff, and you get it in plain mp3s (or OGGs!), and you can give it to your blind neighbour for free, and eventually they'll set the file free for anyone...but for *now*, it's still not the cheapest thing on the block.
(Someone please check my maths)
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
Try WWW.AudioBooksForFree.com. They have been covered on /. before and they allow you to download .mp3 files (of somewhat crappy quality) for free. Or if you want audio quality then you can take out your wallet. They also have hundreds of titles available. It's the only way to survive on the graveyard shift.
1) Make post masquerading as reply to troll. 2) Post reply to that as Anonymous Coward (again, as a fake troll) 3) Reply to previous fake post. 4) Get modded up to +5 each time.
This is a great idea. Maybe we'd even see more technical books available as audiobooks (think the Dover maths texts, for example).
Audiobooks have completely changed my reading habits over the past few years. I now read several books each week, during exercise, driving here and there, etc.
The trouble would be to find talented readers (as a previous post pointed out), but if it required a minimal download fee to hire good readers (or let them quit their day job), I'd certainly support that.
I currently pay $50/month for a membership at Talking Book World, which has a lot of titles, though their selection is fairly light on nonfiction and technical subjects.
Amazing magic tricks
They have a better selection and it's all free (donations are righteous)
I see they have one track from the Bible up right now. I wouldn't be suprised if that was their best seller (at least, before /. linked to them!)
4.15 cents * 60 mins. == 249 cents ($2.49 an hour)
Min. wage in the US is $5.15 an hour.
Mean US Power bill per month (1998):
$46.68 (500 KWH)
$88.12 (1000 KWH)
Mean US Phone bill, sans DSL, per month (1998):
$70
[NOTE: take this with a large amount of salt, source was trying to sell a phone service.]
The Bible is already on the web for free in MP3 format.
http://audiotreasure.com/
In several languages:
The World English Bible narrated by David Williams Old and New Testaments
The King James Bible narrated by Stephen Johnston Old and New Testaments
La Biblia Reina Valera narrated by Juan Alberto Ovalle Nuevo Testamento y Salmos
The King James Bible narrated by ASI New Testament
The Mandarin Bible narrated by ASI Old and New Testaments
Cantonese NT narrated by ASI
Scripture Selections KJV and WEB Encoded for email
Urdu New Testament narrated by ASI
Hindi New Testament narrated by ASI
Tagalog New Testament narrated by ASI
Slovak New Testament narrated by ASI
Polish Bible narrated selections
The Gospels and Psalms in Arabic
Worship Songs in mp3
Hebrew Old Testament narrated by ASI
Punjabi New Testament
Bengali New Testament
Free Christian AudioBooks
Tamil New Testament
God's Powerful Saviour
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Here is a (yet small) collection of links to Free AudioBooks and eBooks.
BTW: Linux on laptops for blind people.
I listen to audiobooks only when I commute. I don't listen to them when I'm working at my computer, and I don't listen to them at home for recreation. If I was to use this service I would have to burn the books to a cd (since I don't own an MP3 player), and I would have to pay for the content and the CDs.
That's not a good deal for me, since I'm already paying for audiobooks through my taxes. My county library system has a very large collection of audiobooks (cassette and CD). If my local branch lacks one I want I just request it through the web interface and in a few days I can pick it up right down the street. In the US the situation is probably similar for most people.
This assumes that Telltale Weekly will expand beyond its current catalog of 23 titles of course...
Apparently, MPEG-1 audio layer 3 decoding costs $15,000 for the first 20,000 units shipped in each fiscal year and 0.75 USD for each additional unit. That's part of cost of goods sold; the cost to the end user would also have to include the administrative cost of dealing with Thomson, the distributor's mark-up, and the dealer's mark-up. Mark-up increases with price in part because the cost of insuring the merchandise against damage or theft increases with price. And then multiply that by the number of patented formats included in the firmware, noticing that MPEG-4 AAC may in fact cost much more than MP3.
If copyright terms approximating the life of the author are necessary to prevent the author from starving to death, then what about the works of recording artists who have already passed away, often along with the songwriter? Why can't Elvis's recordings become free? What is the reasoning behind life plus 70 except as welfare for people who happen to be born heirs to an author?
How can they say that they're providing the audio equivalent to Project Gutenberg when PG has already branched into the audiobooks arena?
I wonder how hard it'd be to write a litte app that'd take books a sentence at a time and stick them through AT&T's Natural Voices demo. Mash up all the MP3s at the end and, hey presto, free audiobooks.
As long as the author isn't inconsiderate enough to write sentence longer than 30 words...
But, before this egregarious misapplication of provisionally available proprietary technology commences, does anyone know what good, free (as in speech and beer) text-to-voice tools are available?
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
yaknow, i'm thinking i could:
- take some of my best short stories,
- get my wife who worked in radio to record them,
- post the MP3s,
- encourage editors to listen on the subway ride.
Maybe that way i could get a book deal.
Although multimedia has enhanced the way we experience various contents, words by themselves (at least in good writing) are really the highest level of abstraction of human thought, the result of intense focus and mental effort. It allows speed reading, skimming, or slow reflection. These are the things that I can only do with text and not with other multimedia. So whether people come up with audio/video or whatever new multimedia libraries, the e-text libraries like Guttenburg would always have a special and irreplaceable place.
Classic TV advertising may even have to give way to pure product-placement campaigns.
What I found interesting is this type of advertising is far from new. I found some old radio programs. The Fibber McGee and Molly episodes were a real eye opener. The show did not break for a word from the sponsor. The pitch man added the product endorsement as part of the show. It seemed to fit just like the Monty Python SPAM SPAM SPAM episode that is so famous except the old radio show was promoting a floor wax. Killing the promotion would leave out an entertaining part of the show. Other than the industry hang-up with DRM and the "perfect copy", the advertising with product placement has come full circle back to the 1940's.
Too bad I have to go to the '40's and '50's to get DRM free MP3's of good radio shows. Most everything newer is locked up in vaults and copyright never to be heard again. I would like to collect the Radio Mystery series from the '70's, but CBS refuses to release it.
The truth shall set you free!
too bad I don't have anything in the way of good enough sound equipment for it.
File size is important. Super high fidelity CD quality is not required or even wanted. It makes the files too big.
Voice is defined by the telephone company as 300 HZ to 3KHZ, not 20 HZ to 20 KHZ usualy mentioned for high fideliety music.
A computer with a sound card and a headset with MONO boom mike provide excelent results. If you are running Windows, then the free utility CDEX used for ripping CD's to MP3 has a record function that works great. Set your bit-rate and sound levels and start reading. 8 bit mono at 11Kbits/sec is quite usable for speech and makes small files. Give it a shot. Use a room free of distracting background noises.
The truth shall set you free!
Most of the oral arguments to the most important Supreme Court cases are available as MP3's from Oyez.com.
Thousands of old radio programs, including mysteries, comedies, political/historical audio, etc. are available for a small flat monthly fee ($7.50/month) at RUSC.com.
I've found it really interesting to be able to listen to *primary* sources for a lot of the cultural history of the United States. Think you understand Brown v. the Board of Education? Listen to the arguments and you'll see how much is missing from your high school telling of the story. It tends to be a bit more meat for listening when compared to the candy that many modern audiobooks provide.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
No one in this thread has really managed to explain why ogg vorbis is necisarry yet. As people have pointed out mp3 (and aac, wma, mp3pro etc) is patented and therefore in order to write an mp3 player or encoder you must pay licencing fees, which are normally charged for each player/encoder that you distribute.
With open source software however, it is impossible to keep track of how many copies have been distributed because anyone is free to modify or redistribute the software. This pretty much makes it illegal to write an open source mp3 player/encoder, since it is impossible to meet the terms of the patent license.
There is an exception for educational and research purposes. However, if a project leader declares in his license that software is for educational purposes only, then he has covered his ass, but the legality problem has now shifted to his users - all the people that use the software for comercial or personal use are now breaking the law. Besides, the reason most of us release our software as open source isn't so people can learn from it, but so it will be usefull to people. We don't want to create a wonderfull collection of software which can only be marvelled at and not put to use. The GPL recognises this and actually prohibits people from further restricting who can use derived works (ie for non-comercial use, non-nuclear use etc).
So the first point is that if we want to follow the law, we don't have a choice but to drop mp3 and make something better. And it really is better to follow the law. One might say "But they have never sued open source developers, you are making a big deal out of nothing". To which I reply "I will trust them not to sue me when I it on paper". You are putting yourself in a bad situation to trust people to play nice. Especially when these people (proprietary software companies and music cartels) are becoming increasingly hostile to open source.
The second point is that it is better for the end user as well. The documents you create and lawfully recieve from others are your own. It is wrong for someone to restrict your access to your files, but this sort of lock-in is exacly what proprietary and patent encumbered file format create. In my opinion, proprietary file formats are a much larger problem than proprietary software.
The current Book at Bedtime (GMT and not streaming live) is Jane Eyre and there are Plays, Short Stories and Soaps too. Contemporary and classic.
All content is free -- paid for by the British taxpayer :)
-DK-
The iTunes software is not entirely free but is available at no charge to end users on the Windows platform. I'll conjecture a business model that would let Apple afford $2.50 per MP3 encoder:
I've been toying with the idea of doing some audiobook reading: for the people in here that do it for a living (for example) or that know somebody who does: how did you start? how does it work?
I have also been thinking about doing it for free (after all, I'm sure there must be charities somewhere that need books/magazines/newspapers readers for people that can't read for a reason or another) but google was not very helpful, does anybody have any ideas about where to look?
-- the cake is a lie
I wrote a short story for my son and recorded it at a local studio.
After hearing about TellTale Weekly on NPR I decided to see if they'd post my story.
They did.
They set the price to cover bandwidth costs and still give me some pocket change. It's a 20 page story which reads in just under 30 minutes. The price was set at $1.50.
I think that the biggest detractor for this medium is that most people don't realize how long it takes to read things out loud.
I read books on tape for the blind through Minnesota State Services for the blind. Even a book which is written with the intent to be read aloud takes more time than just reading through it to yourself.
Anyway, just thought I'd throw in a shameless plug for my story, with hopefully some insights into the whole process.
It's called Ah Sunflower
Read any good sonnets lately?
Project Gutenberg already has a section devoted to audio ebooks, but I have to say I'm all for this Telltale Weekly. All of the PG Audio Books I've listened too have been text-to-speech computer generated audio, and have been rather difficult to understand. As long as Telltale Weekly actually has human readers recording, they will be better than what PG currently has. I do hope that Telltale Weekly submits their audio ebooks to be included in PG.
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