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?

[Face the Facts]

Colour me stupid, but I don't pay any license fees to run my mp3 players. So who does pay?

Yet.

every content provider is looking to incorporate more and more DRM as the quality, cost, and ease of creation of copies improves.

the music industry doesn't care about people copying songs off the radio. it didn't even really get its panties in a bunch when CD-Rs first hit the market. or when mp3s hit the ftp servers. It went ballistic when anyone could download a single application and instantly find a never ending stream of perceptibility loss-less perfect digital copies.

likewise with the MPAA and DVD encryption, likewise with the new Cable Set-top standard.

They want to cut out MythTV, Tivo, splitters, H-cards, and cable descramblers. It's becoming too easy to get at the current data, so they want a change.

with the analog system working (fairly) well as is, why else would they create a new 'standard' for the digital system? It certainly isn't in the interest of the consumer.

Why doesn't Sony support the Blu-Ray with its stock rewritable feature?
Why did Disney/Circuit City/et al try to push (the bad) Divx onto the market in the first place?

It isn't because consumers are clamoring for less control or cheaper movies.

The time is coming when content producers are going to have to realize that their profits will no longer come from format-updates (repurchasing 8-tracks as CDs, VHS classics as DVDs, etc), and will -not- come from service-style access to data. Classic TV advertising may even have to give way to pure product-placement campaigns.

Cable will realize that a move to pay-per-channel is the way to support content without advertising in our new time-shifted digital reality. Some people -will- pay $1/mo for TLC. Home Depot will still pay for product placements in Trading Spaces. Maybe the Super-station will go away - but the cable companies, and popular channels, need not.

the film industry has already shown that the theatre experience is not losing out to cheap cam copies. they've learned that feature-rich dvds or dirt-cheap dvds are preferred to the customer over hacked-together recompressed copies on filesharing networks.

The record companies will need to realize that to win with digital music requires providing the best quality, with the least hassle. They will need to realize that they must beat file-sharing on features. People will give up hunting around for a good (not mislabeled)256kbps rip of Britney's newest song - if they know they can just hit iTunes or its ilk and cough up $1.

Fair Use needs to win out. These purported 'losses' from file-sharing need to be revealed to be grossly overestimated fabrications. (A PSA from a supposed union set painter claiming that file sharing is killing the movie industry, and threatening his job - airing during it's highest grossing year of all time is particularly tactless)

DRM is the tool of the content dinosaur. If they concentrated on actual content piracy rings - where big money is being made off black-market copies, and abandoned their fruitless DRM research - their profits could be higher than ever.

But such is not the reaction of anti-competitive cabals. Being forced to -compete- is not what they do. Suing, threatening, bullying, bribing - these are the blunt instruments they wield instead of the precise tools of innovation, imagination and competition.

So in the meantime - expect every advance to carry DRM in the fine print.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

What I don't get is why they didn't choose Ogg Speex, a codec that is similarly Free, but aimed especially at voice recordings.

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.

Time to upgrade

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Time to look into getting 4Mbps internet and upgrade the 120G hard disk to make room for the War and Peace 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

How about p.d. songs?

[192939495969798999]

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?

finally someone "gets it"

[advocate_one]

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???

Am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Am I missing something?

[xanderwilson]

The idea is to slowly and continually fund, stock, and build a free audio library. Recordings of classic texts, which is the heart of Telltale Weekly, will be offered freely after five years or a given number of sales. When free, these audiobooks can be freely distributed whereever and however, including at Project Gutenberg, if they are interested.

Selling the work cheaply until then pays for current and future bandwidth, hosting, and recording costs--and attracts more talent to the project.

Alex.

Re:OoOoOoo!

[cgranade]

This is the sort of thing that makes me just feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Open source format, using public domain works, eventually releasing under CC, and making money! No DRM needed or used, and proving that if you let people, they'll be perfectly willing to abide by such terms.
/me runs off to buy "The Kiss."

Re:OoOoOoo!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

What a neat idea, I've been looking for some portable culture for my daily commute

You must not have looked very hard:

cat something.txt | festival --tts | lame - something.mp3

or something like that, I don't remember on top of my head.

I used to do that to get the news in my mp3 player automatically in the morning before hitting the road. Of course, it's not very convincing when it tells you something extremely sad or exciting, but it's understandable.

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.

Duh, Have you listened to new music?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

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.

Neato...

[Jin Wicked]

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.

Re:Neato...

[Rich0]

I know a thing or two about sound. I don't think that equipment is the big barrier - while audiophiles and sound engineers love to spend tens of thousands of dollars, the truth is that if you get a decent mic (about $100) for your PC, that will be plenty for spoken voice. Sure, it may not have perfect frequency reproduction and good noise rejection, but we're not recording a live band - just one person with no stray noise. You should also have a nice quiet room.

Where the cost comes into it is in the editing. Most people probably have acceptable voices - if you just teach yourself to speak at a good rate without stuttering. However, NOBODY, and I mean NOBODY, can read a page of text without any errors. Those nice audiobooks that you buy probably had 5 takes for every paragraph. If somebody misreads a sentence they probably just pause and reread it. Then the editor has to listen to the whole thing and splice out the errors. That takes TIME! Plus they probaby do multiple recordings of passages as necessary to get the right dramatic effect.

Then of course somebody has to "proofread" the final work for accuracy.

It is just like filiming movies - a nice digital camera is probably all you need to make a feature film, in theory (that and the sound equipment). However, the reality is that you need to film each scene from 14 angles 24 times and pick the very best clips for the show. That is what makes filming expensive.

I don't think that you'll ever see a completely free Gutenberg-like project for audiobooks - at least not until voice synthesizers sound just like people. Gutenberg works because of OCR and the ease of distributed proofreading.

Maybe the first step would be a distributed editing approach for audiobooks. If you could get somebody to do the initial reading, the editing could potentially be distributed. Granted, forget a simple web-browser interface - we'll need client-server at the least (potentially a Java applet might work), and lots of bandwidth. Still something worth thinking about though...

Re:Neato...

[xanderwilson]

Where the cost comes into it is in the editing.

Ah, somebody understands....

Still something worth thinking about though...

At some point later this year I'd like to start a steering/planning discussion (forum or list, likely) about the direction Telltale will take to become more community-led. I'm fairly certain that by the end of the year, this project will be limited by what I'm doing with it, rather than encouraged by my work. If this is something that interests you, I hope you'll send me a note or join the newsletter.

Alex.

TTS is no substitute for audiobooks.

[Monx]

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?

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

Nice idea, but you're probably already paying

[Call Me Black Cloud]

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...

$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.

Free non-book, spoken word

[LetterJ]

I currently listen to quite a few audiobooks, but supplement it with audio of classic radio, Supreme Court arguments, etc.

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.

Plays and books on the BBC

[davekebab]

There are plenty of streaming books and plays on the BBC radio site.
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-

I'm there

[scottennis]

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