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.)

Comments

what is Ogg Vorbis?

[Face the Facts]

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.

Re:what is Ogg Vorbis?

[Anonymous Coward]

And what idiot moderator modded this "informative"? he was responding to no-one at all. This is blatant karma-whoring.

MOD PARENT DOWN

Re:what is Ogg Vorbis?

[Monx]

Perhaps I'm overconfident, but I'm fairly sure that nobody's going to show up at my house and demand a check to pay for the continued use of my iPod.

Of course not. Apple already paid it for you -- which means you paid when you bought it. All legal mp3 players have to pay for a license. They just pass it on to you in the price of your player. Windows users don't have to pay the "Microsoft Tax" themselves when they buy a new computer, it's included in the price.

Re:what is Ogg Vorbis?

[xanderwilson]

I considered this initially and I'm suprised that of all the feedback requests for other formats, this is the first time anyone has publicly or privately requested Speex.

Mainly it's the lack of support for Speex (I know, I know. Something has to come first, the chicken or the egg.) in devices and software. But I figure the more popular Ogg Vorbis gets (and the more support Xiph.org gets) the more likely Speex will eventually become a complimentary standard. While Ogg Vorbis was designed for music, not voice, it's still a better alternative than MP3.

For the "fundraising" part of this audiobook project, a third format Telltale might offer would most likely be AAC, based on user requests. But I do intend to eventually support Speex for free works.

Alex.

Re:what is Ogg Vorbis?

[lingenfr]

I also wondered about Speex. I signed up with Bitpass, but don't have enough bandwidth to download a book yet. I am wondering if they do music and soundeffects backgrounds to their reading. If so, some folks wouldn't like what Speex does to the music. I have used Speex to encode some talkradio. I am no expert and did not monkey with all of the settings, but there was a noticeable difference in voice quality (not that bothered me) but when music started playing in the background it was poor and broken.

Just a thought. I too would like to have the option of Speex. I am hoping to be able to play Speex files on my Neuros some day. If not, I am happy with my Oggs.

Re:OoOoOoo!

[nandhp]

I found a solution to this: iPodLibrary. It automatically chops up your notes into little "Chapters" and supports TXT, PDF, LIT, and Windows (not Linux).

Reg Free Link

[BoldAC]

Reg Free Link. Enjoy!

AC

Re:OoOoOoo!

[cgranade]

They make an exception for the blind. You may, if you have purchased one copy, make unlimited copies for the blind provided that you limit access to those additional copies.
Read more.

Re:How about p.d. songs?

[elleomea]

You may want to take a look at iRate. Not all are necessarily public domain, but all are freely distributed by their authors.

Not that cheap

[twoshortplanks]

I love the idea. This could be really big. However, it's not actually that cheap. Auduble offer two books a month for 40usd. Picking two books off the front page (Cold mountain, 14h 21m, Dude Where's My Country, 6h 57m) that's 3.12 cents a minute.

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)

Audio Books For Free . Com

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Already available

[doublem]

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

More Free AudioBooks

[wehe]

Here is a (yet small) collection of links to Free AudioBooks and eBooks.

BTW: Linux on laptops for blind people.

$0.75 marked up three times

[tepples]

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.

Re:Time to upgrade

[clifyt]

Ya know, when I signed up for Audible.com, one of the first things I bought was War and Piece. It comes in 8 files -- the largest of which is 123 Megs...so the simple calculation is that it should take around 1 Gig at the highest quality of recording. It also comes in:

Fair (1 Hour of audio = 2MB): 20MB
Medium / Good (1 Hour = 4 MB): 33MB
Medium / Better (1 Hour = 7 MB): 61MB
and as mentioned
Excellent (1 Hour = 14MB): 123MB

The Medium Better is good enough for most speech oriented listenings of this which would weigh in at half (for the math impared) a gig.

Heck, you could listen to War and Peace on a solid state MP3 player and not have a problem at this resolution. 120Gig??? You are outta your gord. My several year old 5Gig iPod carries this easily (and its just as confusing remembering the characters in audio as it is in print -- then again, I'm not on the motorcycle shooting around at 90MPH weaving in around cars with the print version either).

Don't ya hate it when folks ruin 'funny' rated threads with serious info :-P

Re:Natural Voices

[MenTaLguY]

Festival is at least tolerably good; it's under an X11-style license. It's admittedly not as nice as AT&T's thing though.