Slashdot Mirror
Gaiman on MP3 Audio Books, Mirrormask
A reader writes: "It appears that Neil Gaiman released two of his books (Anansi Boys and American Gods) as books on CD. The interesting twist is that they are being released as MP3 - which for the world of audio books is something pretty new. ". Indeed; MP3 audio books, I think, have given the book publishers the willies because of the DRM issue - anyone else seen this before? And also worth noting that Mirrormask was released in motion picture form and rocks. I think to describe it would be equal parts The Dark Crystal and Myst, combine with Carnivale and a dash of The City of Lost Children.
What's it like to grow up with a name like Gaiman?
It's got to be rough.
The writeup seems to indicate that Gaiman is actually announcing something or recently held an interview, yet the only links in the story are to the front page of his website and to his books.
I find the only Audio books that have any effect on me are the instructional kind. For instance, learning a new language such as through the Pimsleur series.
I would be interested in knowing if anyone actually prefers the audio format to traditional page flipping.
In terms of going MP3, wouldn't the author have saved a lot in fees by going OGG, or is acceptance too much of a concern?
~jennifer.k~
MP3 cds for sale here:
o books_audio_books.html
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/shopsite/mp3_audi
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Saw it this past Friday, it's an amazing movie. The direction and art design is by Dave McKean; his style is absolutely beautiful, but it might throw some people off. I loved it.
After the show a friend noted that it has a feel very similar to "The Neverending Story", and I think that's accurate.
Anyone else wondering exactly how you market Mirrormask brand gravel?
-Hmm...I got a G+ invite, better remember to remove the request from my sig...-
Not huge yet, but let's face it... as far as security is concerned, If you can get the cd, you can rip to mp3. I do that all the time to get books to listen to while I'm running. Angela's Ashes will be playing for me during a marathon this weekend.
(For you national socialists at RIAA, no, I am not posting the mp3's. This is for my own fair use)
-- There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
audio books are the only thing i use my ipod for. really. also, in th epast 10 years i might have "read" 3-4 books. in the past 2 months ive listened to 6? maybe 7? and they were 15 hour books, davinci code, etc. everything from angels and demons to charlie and the great glass elavator. i only listen to unabridged books and i absolutely am ADDICTED to audiobooks.
The interesting twist is that they are being released as MP3 - which for the world of audio books is something pretty new.
My local public library has had a special section for MP3-based audio CDs for at least a year now. The only issue is that many traditional CD players in homes and in cars can't play MP3 CDs. But I'd rather have one MP3 CD versus 15 traditional audio CDs. Admittedly, it's a pretty darn good local library.
And regarding DRM - hell, regular audio CDs aren't DRM'd, so the execs don't need to worry about theft from an MP3 CD any more than they have to worry about theft from a regular audio CD. After all, an MP3 is only one rip away.
It's been possible to download in MP3 format from Audible.com for a while now. They aren't DRM restricted but I believe they are watermarked so if they're distributed they can be traced back. You can also download and burn to ordinary audio CDs, which I've never done but obviously can't be copy protected.
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
well you've convinced me
*goes off to find some free (as in free parking) audiobooks to listen to on the run today*
~jennifer.k~
MP3 audio is supported in the latest Digital Talking Books standard used by the Library of Congress (ANSI/NISO Z39.86). The LOC is looking for contractors now to produce DTBs for the blind and visually imparied, so you'll be seeing a lot of these (or perhaps hearing them) soon. Digital distribution of talking books should result in more affordable equipment for playing the media and easier mass duplication.
I am not a crackpot.
They have collections of both human read mp3 audio books and computer read mp3 audio books (kind of weird).
mp3 audiobooks have been around for many years on p2p file sharing networks.
Isis publishing has been releasing compressed format audio books for a couple of years. It makes sense, after all would you prefer 1 disc, or 11 discs, if you're manufacturing and shipping the things? OK, they currently use WMA, but at least they're trying :-)
If you put the stuff out on CD it will be ripped, end of story (no pun intended). If you can reduce your costs significantly and provide the same thing, then why not do it? It's not like audio books need --alt-preset extreme applied to 'em, is it?
MP3s of audio books are excellent for long car journeys, etc, so more power to the elbow of those making them: I'll keep buying them.
There are alot of DVD players, and a few (too few, it seems) car CD players that support MP3 cd's, and probably mostly don't speak ogg. I have one in my car, it allows me to have alot less disc switching going on. This is especially helpful for a book. My sister is in the process of going blind, so I've been burning her Stephen King's Dark Tower series for her cd player, and it'd save me alot of time if it could stay in MP3.
Don't you only pay a royalty to Thomson et al if you make a device/piece of software which can encode MP3s? So MP3 decoders are not subject to a fee-paying license, and neither are the MP3s either.
Since virtually no-one in the world has an OGG portable player (the market I'd imagine that this guy is interested in - would you want to sit at your desk/laptop to hear a book?), it makes sense to stick with MP3.
I was almost correct, but at the same time quite wrong - no fee is payable if the activity is non-commercial. So maybe he has a fee to pay, but maybe that is offset by the sheer number of MP3 players. see here. "However, no license is needed for private, non-commercial activities (e.g., home-entertainment, receiving broadcasts and creating a personal music library), not generating revenue or other consideration of any kind or for entities with associated annual gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00."
Also, in addition to being a whole to-do schlep for publishers, DRM-like functions have had history with pissing the public off (remember that Beatie Boys album?).
I myself usually have both a regular book and an audiobook in progress, but Audiobooks, even the well acted kind, don't hold a candle to the likes of:
Big Finish http://www.bigfinish.com/ Fantastic scifi audio (mostly Doctor Who related)
or
Noise Monster http://www.noisemonster.com/.
Anyone wanting something more than an audiobook, but still staying in the audio medium should check out their stuff. It's written and produced directly for the audio, and in the case of Doctor Who from Big Finish, is licensed by the BBC and uses the original cast.
-Hmm...I got a G+ invite, better remember to remove the request from my sig...-
torrent plz
Having just reread American Gods, let me just say that I totally forgot what a superb author Gaiman is. I highly recommend this book -- I bought it, on a whim, on the recommendation of a shouting crazy guy in a bookstore. It was a good choice!
And I commend him for this mp3 thing. I think that a night or two ago I switched sides on the DRM issue. I was on the fence -- it seems like it's hard to do anything but let the digital world happen, but, you know, hopefully (RIAA greed aside) people should be able to get money for their work.
But last night, I found myself curled up with comfy blankets, half a bottle of rum, a DVD, and this beautiful, brilliant, and generally amazing girl I had recently met. This was a new DVD she had brought over, bought straight from a store. I put it in my computer, tried to play it, and saw a message about failed authentication. None of my players worked. They all said that the DVD could not be played because of DRM. One player asked me to go and send a long page of identifying information before watching the DVD.
We never got to watch the DVD. We found an appropriate replacement among my pirated movies and the night was salvaged. But I think that may have marked my "Fuck the MPAA" turning point. Suddenly I sympathize with the "fuck off and don't tell me what to do with my data" contingent.
So I wholeheartedly approve of Neil's mp3 release, even if I don't know how it will work as a business model given rampant piracy. But keep the MPAA, the RIAA, and Mr. Gaiman out of my pants.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
I spent 2 hours commuting EVERY DAY
and i allready feel thoes are wasted hours of my life, if i was using public transport i could be reading.
i have an MP3/WMA/CD player in my car (really nice but affordable JVC)
i would love LOVE LOVE to listen to say.. A brief history of time, or the dune books or something like that on an MP3/CD
any by saying LOVE.. i do mean $$$PAY$$$
$40 a book?
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
He did write in his journal that he thinks the mp3 audiobooks haven't caught on yet. He's done a pile of signings, and as of the DC Book Fest, he said he had only signed one mp3 CD of Anansi Boys.
MP3 is not really optimal for speech. E.g. speex would provide much better quality/bitrate ratio. Sadly, speex is not very well supported. (I would love to have a digital portable recorder with a built-in speex codec.)
When American Gods was released in print, I was lucky enough to have the first chapter read to me by Gaiman at a signing, and it was fantastic to listen to him read that much of it. But the thought of lugging around multiple CDs (which is traditionally how they come) for one lengthy novel puts me off the audio bit.
I have a copy of The Lord of the Rings trilogy on CD that is supposedly fantastic, but it's almost a spindle-worth of CDs and I can't get into it because of that--what a commitment. And I'd rather carry around a tattered copy of the book than spend the time ripping them to MP3s that I could dump to my iPod so I could have them on the go.
MP3 format should make the audios involve less discs... and that appeals to me. BUT, I don't have an MP3 player in my car, so the disc would be ripped to my computer and dumped on my iPod for transport.
As an aside, Daniel Quinn's book Ishmael was given to me as a book on tape about 10 years ago. I wore it out listening to it and am now searching for another audio copy of that recording.
And I should probably also note that I am generally a very page-turning traditionalist when it comes to my reading...but audio adaptations/recordings do have their place.
Greatness. It comes in many forms, sometimes it comes in the form of sacrifice - that's the loneliest form.
Wouldn't that be more like, "Gaiman's press agent calls Hemos on his cellphone, which he has on speed dial ever since the first time that /. editor fell all over himself gushing about his client" ?
"A Reader Writes" Wow. Not even the pretext of format or decorum any more.
I don't know how new this is seeing that Apple has been selling all the Harry Potter books in iTunes since the nano launch. I am assuming thier in MP3 format.
On the same topic, who is getting ripped off when I, you, or your neighbor downloads a book from my, yours, your neighbors favorite program (UseNet is mine). I can't imagine its the RIAA, but the readers of the books might actually be on RIAA contracts.
Anyone know who is going to sue me for downloading an Audio Book?
As someone who's commuted to/from work at about 1.5 - 2 hours each way, by car (mass transit is rubbish from NH to Boston) for years, audio books were my sanity-saver. I can also imagine that since Audio seems to come out far before braille, it opens up all sorts of books for the blind.
--- no sig to see here... move along.
Indeed; MP3 audio books, I think, have given the book publishers the willies because of the DRM issue
Jimmy, thats a cute costume....but what is it??
I'm a book on MP3! BOOO!
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
I wasn't too impressed with MirrorMask. Visually and aurally it's very nice, but the story would be better off as an adventure game.
I would be interested in knowing if anyone actually prefers the audio format to traditional page flipping.
For certain applications, I find that they're much better. Basically, they're great for "hands free" reading, in situations where you couldn't conveniently (or safely) read a book, like while exercising, doing housework, walking around (remembering to use your eyes extra carefully to subsitute for your occupied ears when, say, crossing streets).
Also, a good performance by the narrator can do great things for a book. There are some very fine voice actors reading these books, and the best of them are fantastic. Other narrators are, well, less fantastic. It's very much a personal preference issue, though: heated arguments over the quality of the narrator regularly break out in the reviews over at Audible.com. (Like another poster, I use my iPod mainly for audiobooks, and I've been doing Audible's two-books-a-month subscription plan for years, now. Not free, but affordable enough for me.)
One free audio book I can recommend is "Free Culture" by Lawrence Lessig, which a bunch of people recorded into an audio book, which was permitted by Lessig's release of the book under a Creative Commons license. You can find it over at www.legaltorrents.com. The narrators are enthusiastic rather than skilled, in some cases, but the material is so interesting that it's easy to forgive the occasional lapses.
Do you have to pay fees to distribute MP3s? That stinks. I though they just charged for encoders/decoders.
And yes, I would think that if someone is trying to distribute audio to a mass audience, it would help to go with a file format that most people will have a decoder for. That's the problem with these things-- it's a catch 22. Pretty much no one will use it until the decoder is ubiquitous, and pretty much no one will bother distributing the decoder until people are using it.
I have a copy of The Lord of the Rings trilogy on CD that is supposedly fantastic, but it's almost a spindle-worth of CDs and I can't get into it because of that--what a commitment. And I'd rather carry around a tattered copy of the book than spend the time ripping them to MP3s that I could dump to my iPod so I could have them on the go.
I listened to LOTR in audio form a few years ago, and my main thought was, "What the hell? They sing and recite poetry all the bloody time!" Turns out, I just edited all that out of the print version, so I had essentially no memory of it. In audio, it was clear that this happened constantly, and it was harder to skim over.
If anyone writes in to urge me to listen carefully to the poetry, and possibly learn Elvish, it will go hard for them.
Audio books are excellent time-fillers for long car trips, where reading a traditional book would give me motion-sickness. It's also a good way to "share" a book with other people; much like watching a movie together with your friends.
My personal favorites are audiobooks that are staged like radio drama, with multiple voice-actors and sound effects. Listening to these encourages me to use my imagination as if I was reading the book - what do the characters look like? What are they doing now? What was that "thump" just now?
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
Earth Core is a fantastic novel that was released as a "Podio book." It can be found on PodioBooks.com. High quality, well written and creep-tacular. It's also interesting to note that based on the popularity of the podcast the author got a print deal for the book and is being courted for the movie rights. Sort of a new take on the "vanity press" publications of yore...
Apparently not. ;)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
mass transit is rubbish from NH to Boston
well, to be fair, you were travelling to an entirely different state.
however, assuming that you lived in Salem, NH (a fair assumption, since you were commuting to Boston), you could drive about 26 minutes to reach Lowell, MA and get on the commuter rail. One could also drive to Haverhill, MA (about 8 miles from Salem, NH) and hop on the commuter rail there as well.
my pet machine
I converted "Fellowship of the Ring" and "The Two Towers" to MP3 for my mom to listen to in her car. At 64kbps mono, you can comfortably fit all 15 CDs of either book to fit on one CD.
It reduces disc switching, which is a potentially serious issue when she's driving.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
It was basically Labyrinth turned inside out sans Jennifer Connely and David Bowie.
useless sig advice - Read Nabokov.
Hello, I work for the RIAA.
Fair use is a myth. You are guilty of piracy.
Please send your check for $24,000 to the RIAA with the next 30 days, or we will initiate legal proceedings.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Absolutely prefer MP3's to traditional page flipping out of necessity. I have a 2 hour round trip commute each day and that's the only way I have time to 'read' anything. I still try to find time at home w/the wife & 3 kids but by the time the house is quiet enough for me to read, I'm pretty much nodding off after a couple pages.
The iTunes books are in a DRMed Apple format. You can only play them of five different computers, and on iPods that are properly configured to work with one of those computers.
It's all in the DRM baby.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
The LOTR done by "The Mind's Eye" is abridged and cuts out much of the unnecessary bits. I believe it clocks in at 20 hours total.
You've been able to get most any audio book in compressed electronic form for some time now. It's actually pretty cheap.
Audible
You can get a subscription for cheap, which allows you to download a couple books a month for a price far below the traditional cost of audio books.
"If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter." -Terry Pratchet, on Popcorn.
"Since virtually no-one in the world has an OGG portable player (the market I'd imagine that this guy is interested in - would you want to sit at your desk/laptop to hear a book?), it makes sense to stick with MP3."
Actually IRiver and RIO both have players that support Ogg. Yes MP3 is a more universal format so using it for a an audio book is the logical choice. Too bad none of the portable players support speex. You could put a a lot of books on a pretty small player that way.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
In addition to the benefits of a nice commute, it's much easier on my eyes. I hate wearing reading glasses and I hate reading without them, so it's a catch-22. The audio book solves all of that. Praise be to Audible. For some reason their stock (ADBL) has been plummeting recently, and I can't figure why. Seems like a great/innovative idea.
Be sure to remember the Programmers Prayer
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
MP3 has always seemed like a logical medium for audio books to me. Ever since my wife and son caught the Harry Potter bug a few years ago, they will buy not only the dead-tree version, but also the audio version on CD.
Its always struck me as particularly wasteful that these things were available only as conventional audio. A single book can span 20 or more CDs.
That has always seemed somewhat wasteful to me. I'm presuming that an audio CD of a person reading a book is availing itself of the full harmonic range that would also be applied to a more elaborate production, like a symphony orchestra or a rock or jazz band that would make much fuller use of that range.
Voice telephony is based on transmitting only a narrow band of the harmonic range used by most human voice communication. Putting that narrower range together with the compression techniques available through MP3 or other similar audio formats, it seems to me that number of disks needed to store one of these books could be slashed to a small fraction of what are produced now.
This may only have a negligible effect on the final price of the item, and the popularity of MP3 enabled CD players may not have hit the critical mass needed to make this sort of thing profitable yet, but I'd think that enough popular releases, like Harry Potter or some others, might actually stimulate their adoption, or at least speed it up beyond the current rate.
I watched Mirrormask with my girlfriend* and two friends last weekend. The visual design was fantastic -- truly beautiful and inventive.
... sucked. It was basically a regurgitation of a bunch of ideas that have been done elsewhere, better. Child has problems with parent; child goes into dreamworld where their parent is represented by some significant figure; child resolves their issues with parent. Happy ending.
...
On the other hand, Gaiman's responsible for the plot, and the plot
It might do as an OK children's movie, but as much as I'm not a fan of the Harry Potter books, I think the latter books' plots beat it.
But man, the visuals
*I'm not making this up.
I wish public librarys would had an online function simliar to audible.com Since i listen to so many books, my audible bill is kinda expensive (around 50$ a month!) id LOVE for the public library to offer an audible type service. not sure how they would do it but it would be great.
is what the best audio books present. Even the unabridged one, the narrator makes a great deal of difference. For example, the "Rumpole of the Bailey" series and "The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents" had excellent performances which added to the enjoyment of the written words. In contrast, the "Xenocide" performance was marred by fake Chinese accents that was entirely irrelevant and sterotypical.
"American God" was fine on audio tape. THe lenth was not a problem to me at all, but I do drive a great deal!
There are surprising gems as well. The essay "Stickeen" by John Muir totally 'blew me away'. The recital of a journey over the glaciers that manages to be plain yet exalts in the glories of Life. It is by far, the best I've heard in years.
I liked the Mirrormask art works, but the story is just too weak. Not as good as Coraline, closer to Neverwhere. There was not enough emotional connections, in terms of peril or empathy. Doesn't reach the wonder and polish of "City of Lost Children".
I just wanted to speak up for the more environmentally-conscious commuters too - I listen to audiobooks on the (hour per day) cycling part of my journey into work. What's more, these days find that I most often just continue to listen on the train (the rest of the journey), rather than get a physical book out (which I save for bed)...
"I would be interested in knowing if anyone actually prefers the audio format to traditional page flipping."
I don't know if I prefer the audio format, but I do find it entertaining. I've listened to audio books while doing some mind numbing stuff at work. Great way to kill a few hours, but they often leave stuff out of the text version of the book. The Return of the Jedi audio play was kinda neat. Not precisely a book on CD, but it made my drive across country a little more interesting.
"In terms of going MP3, wouldn't the author have saved a lot in fees by going OGG, or is acceptance too much of a concern?"
Nope. MP3 fees are paid when you produce software that encodes MP3 audio. The book publisher, other than buying the software that can encode in MP3 format, isn't paying any additional fees. The MP3 fee was probably paid long before this audio book went for sale.
"Derp de derp."
In my spare time, I am working on developing audio training modules for developers/programmers:
http://www.developeradvantage.com/products.html
I only have one finished, but expect to roll out a few more by the end of the year.
FREE - Java, J2EE and Ajax Audiobooks for Software Developers - www.DeveloperAdvantage.com
You beat me to it! The other thing I could suggest is the goldmine of comedy and drama on BBC Radio 4 and BBC7. I use ReplayRadio (free trial to rip this stuff to MP3 and listen to it in the car at least 3 days a week, the other 2 usually reserved for Big Finish.
Yep, I'm addicted too. I've been listening to 2+ books a month for 4-5 years now. I'd give up cable tv and maybe even home internet access before I give up my Audible.com subscription. I almost look forward to the daily commute now.
The government subsidizes the blind (ostensibly the largest market) to buy audiobooks. This allows the audio book companies to charge extraordinarily high prices which makes it high for the rest of us. I suspect that if the subsidy went away it would dramatically lower the price and increase the number of audiobooks that are sold. But I also suspect that it would be very hard to stop subsidies for the blind politically.
I saw Mirror Mask a couple of weeks ago. While it's a great movie to look at, Gaiman needs to leave things like plot and dialog to someone else. Find a good screenwriter! Concept, art, and execution were fantastic, but the plot was fragmented and a complete snooze.
Great that they release under a non-DRM format such as MP3. .ogg (Ogg Vorbis) too.
Wish they would release it as
Are you a member of your local library?
Most have decent collections of audio materials on tape and / or CD --- when I was commuting like that, I paid $20 to get a membership in a library near my workplace in addition to the membership I already had in the local library (they weren't reciprocal) and usually managed to have a sufficient selection to keep my mind occupied during the commute --- did get some audio books as gifts, and bought a few others at need, but using the library kept it affordable.
``Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.'' (anyone know who said that? My copy of Bartlett's is at home)
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
So does Samsung and iAudio. Last week my wife decided she finally wanted an MP3 player and, since I'd ripped most of our CDs in OGG format, I required that it support OGG. She required that it be "cute". This was far more difficult than one might think.
The first problem: Sorting out which players actually support OGG. Depending on what website you go to to compare, and what manufacturer you use, it can be quite difficult to find which players support OGG. Many of the manufacturers do not support OGG on all players (iRiver, for example). Some players claim OGG support in some places but not others.
The second problem: "What the hell is OGG?" That's what most non-geeks will say. Even some geeks who think that de facto standards trump open standards will give you a queer look when you mention OGG. Certainly you'll run into problems if you walk into Best Buy and say: "I'm looking for an MP3 player with OGG support."
The third problem (not for me, but I'm sure for many): It's not supported on the iPod. Ugh. Yeah yeah, AAC, whatever.
The fourth problem: You've made using iTunes much more difficult. Now you must either burn and copy or use something to strip the DRM. Of course, you could use another service, but then you get Microsoft DRM, which is bleh. Then you have eMusic, which is good accept it's a monthly fee service (the only point of joining a service like that is to get the occasional single, otherwise buying CDs is so much better) and it doesn't have as good of a library. There's the less-than-legal ways to get your music, but they shouldn't be considered (for this argument).
Wow, what a tangent.
Anyway, the flip side of this is when someone gets a player that supports OGG, but doesn't do so purposefully. They read something that says "OGG Vorbis support" and don't know what that is. Then they forget. After that, as far as their concerned, they don't have a way to play that.
I would be interested in knowing if anyone actually prefers the audio format to traditional page flipping. Prefure? No, but it is definatly handy in many situations, mainly those where reading is not so viable like driveing to work, commuting to work on packed trains or even out for a walk as they are a nice alternative to just pumping music out all the time. I generally keep one audio book on my ipod for all these, currently "rereading" the whole "wheel of time" series via my ipod.
I just got _We Few_ in this format, in CD it would be 13 disks but a single CD in MP3 and sounded fine.
http://www.blackstoneaudio.com/
I've seen it a couple times before, but I'm not sure whether or not it was legal.
O BTW : I finally got an office job that I can sit here and waste company time at! KUDOS TO ME!
You're nothing; like me.
Congratulations on being the first retard to step forward.
The few that I've listened to were done by people that were KFA as actors and done more like a "audio drama" than a 'book reeding'. One of the few exceptions was a charles dickons reeding by Patrick Steward. I had a hard to find audio dramaesk biology book that was a ton on fun and I learned a little something. Language books that are done like that are good to because it places the language into context. I found a sample of one where some people were at a party-sounded like they were giving people a death sentence or something.
has a decent collection of audiobooks in MP3 format. Free at low bitrates, reasonable at higher bitrates. Many are simply read, not performed. Though the Jeeves series are quite good. There are a few SF also, but mostly classics.
Big Finish production makes an amazing series of audio books for fans of Dr. Who. These are true audio plays with most of the original cast of the TV series. Many stories are better than what was on the TV shows (until the recent Incarnation in '05, that is). This is truely a worthy continuation of the saga that was not possible using printed word alone.
It's no wonder you have trouble finding "OGG" support. There's no such thing. The post you replied to got it right: it's "Ogg".
Too, you really can get Ogg/Vorbis support on older iPods (now very cheap, on eBay), thanks to the excellent crew at http://ipodlinux.org/. Yes, it will dual-boot. Booting under Linux you can transfer files directly from yours to anybody else's, whatever they are running. I don't know whether you can install linux on them that way, but if you can it would be the polite thing to do when you get connected.
Well my partially sighted girlfriend* certainly prefers them to struggling with the paper versions. I listened to a couple of the Series of Unfortunate Events books that I bought her for Christmas and they are very entertaining. I think a lot of that is to do with the person narrating them. Tim Curry was fantastic and got into all the characters really well. From what I've heard Lenny Henry has done an amazing job with Anansi Boys too but I currently only have the paper version. Actually, I believe there is a free sampler of the first chapter around somewhere... Thanks Google... http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/01%20Harper%20Au dio%20presents%20Anansi%20Boys.mp3
:)
*Please avoid jokes about slashdotters only getting partially sighted girlfriends
I noticed the Pimsleur series you mentioned and have looked them up, they seem to have a good selection (interested in Russian language myself). I am interested in learning other languages via audio book. Other then Pimsleur (seemed pricey) are there any other Audio Books for learning a new language that someone would recommend?
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
I am a big fan of the artist (Dave McKean) involved in the mirrormask movie (he also does the sandman covers). I'm not a NG fan (my girlfriend is) but I went to see the movie for the artist. The storyline isn't that great honestly. The visuals on the otherhand are NUTS. In a way it may be overdoing it. All of the matrix movies combined couldn't amount to the amount of visuals in this movie. Again the story isn't what I'd call 'solid' and for this reason it wouldn't appeal to widescale audiences.
Note: I saw a limited showing in atlanta with the '15 other people' who had actually 'heard of it'
I saw Neil Gaiman at a book reading/signing in Seattle, where he talked about the mp3 audio book. Apparently Gaiman had to fight hard with his publishers to get the book out on mp3. The publishers were worried about an MP3 CD having no protection against copying and sharing whatsoever. But in Gaiman's own (paraphrased) words "Most people, when they buy the audiobook, the first thing they're going to do it carefully rip it and put it on their iPod. So why can't we just do most of the work for them?"
So once again, it's a case of the artist fighting for better access for the listener/reader/watcher, against the wished of the business execs. They claim they're trying to protect the artist but when artists have to fight for things they want, like mp3 audiobooks, CC-licensed book, and torrents of albums, it gets pretty easy to see through the lies.
Stupid like a fox!
I can't keep track of the plot, since I can't flip back and forth or ask questions, so I reallly only use audiobooks for stuff that doesn't need a plot - Pimsleur is one such example, another is lectures (the Feynman lectures); right now, I'm listening to "The Majesty of the Law" by Sandra Day O'Connor, and it's only minimally affected by my inability to check previous references to cases.
There's been lots of mp3 Audiobooks.
Fictionwise has been selling mp3 audiobooks for at least a year, maybe two.
Baen has been selling mp3 audiobooks and including them for free on CDs included in some volumes for about as long.
I prefers the audio format to traditional page flipping. I listem during menial tasks like my job.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
Check out Conlan Press for the audiobook of Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, being offered in downloadable MP3 format, book-on-CD format, MP3 CD format, or both mp3 and book-on-CD.
(Note that the book-on-CD version never has shipped, even though it's been months since people placed their pre-orders. Apparently they've been having pressing problems.)
Folks might be interested to know, by the bye, that Beagle is in a financial dispute with the company that has the rights to the animated version of The Last Unicorn and is seeking donations to a legal aid fund.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Many Doctor Whos (not the Big Finnish plays mentioned elsewhere), but also Fawlty Towers, Tolkien, Hitchhiker's Guide...
Try searching for mp3cd on play.com (slashdot ate my url)
No DRM, no problem - just annoying gaps between tracks, and the HHG one seems to have been badly encoded and never repressed, so avoid.
Apologies to William Gibson.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
A couple of other good audio books as MP3's are Scott Sigler's EarthCore and Ancestor. He's been releasing them as a podcast, one episode a week. EarthCore is now complete, you can download the whole thing. Ancestor just started a few weeks ago. He went direct to podcast with these, and EarthCore generated enough interest that he got a book deal out of it. Dead tree edition is available in November.
Audio books are excellent time-fillers for long car trips, where reading a traditional book would give me motion-sickness.
Agreed. My wife and I have listened to a few audiobooks on the trip to LA from SF and back. Great way to pass the time. Unfortunately, some books are better narrated than others, as some have mentioned. Steve Martin's "The Pleasure Of My Company" and Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" are well done. But Ludlum's "Bourne Identity" and "Bourne Supremecy" are often incoherent... the narrator sometimes speaks in a quiet, deep mumble which gets lost in the background music and road noise. They were also abridged, which irks me; I want the whole story, esp. at the bookshelf prices these things go for.
What radio dramas to you recommend? I'm aware of and enjoy THHGTTG, of course, but what else?
too bad DaVinci Code sucked :-)
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Yes, the DRM issues of releasing two CDs full of MP3s verses five or six CDs full of CDDA encoded tracks are astounding. Why it saves me the full fifteen minutes it normally takes to rip the CDs into Ogg Vorbis. Woo Hoo! That's another fifteen minutes I could be using to subvert the system!
I think it depends on what your reading or the context of the situation (ie school reading or casual).
:/
I love audio books because I have a very demanding schedule and I just simply can't be in one spot and not be interrupted for very long. In terms of just casual reading, its great. I listened to the Davinci Code that way, and it was fun. However, I think its a little different when its either a required reading or something that you might need to recall for either work/school. I listened to book in that respect, and it was very difficult to recall everything. Mostly because I was distracted (hard to listen/read a book that you didn't want to read in the first place).
Distraction is the biggest problem. I found it very difficult to listen to an audio book in the car (I don't commute, so I have short trips, not much spent on the highway), and would easily get distracted. Listening at home was much easier, but I found that listening in the dark was the only way to either fully enjoy it or pat full attention.
Either way, I love audio books, and can't wait till more are available. Although, I'm sure when my schedule dies down, I think I might prefer actual reading, as to absorb more.....in the end it all depends on my schedule
Gaiman once mentioned that Alice's Adventures under Ground has influenced his work on the Sandman series.
It's a wonderful movie for children. Sure, it's dark, artsy, and a bit creepy; nothing like the bright, formulaic, happy/we're-on-crack animations we have nowadays ... but there is great fun to be had, imaginations to tap, and it is a fairy-tale styled story that teaches good values. Definitely a movie worth seeing again.
Notes: I referred to "Alice's Adventures under Ground" instead of "Alice in Wonderland" as that is the original name, and more importantly, it both reminds of how dark the book is and distances my reference from anything resembling Disney (this movie is not for sheltered children whose parents limit their world to what Disney provides). Also, I haven't seen Labyrinth in over ten years.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
fool! it's the illuminati!
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Comedy books are good as audio. I've listened to some of George Carlin's stuff, and I think I prefer the audio versions. You just can't compare having him read the material to you to having to read it yourself.
I also second the Pimsleur recommendation. Though it's expensive, it's been very useful for me when learning Japanese.
1. There is no good way to describe a graph and not interrupt the flow of the text. It may be necessary to add text and edit it into the manuscript so it is seamless.
2. A recorded performance does not have to be done in one take. Several readers flubbed lines and tried to recover as if performing live. For crying out loud, edit out the errors.
I will say that I enjoyed the book, but errors like those (almost) made me want to record my own version of the offending chapters.
Language students: Don't try to learn English here. This ain't it.
Mind's Eye also did a nice Hobbit.
BBC also did a nice abridged version of LOTR. Interesting differences from Mind's Eye. Personally, I own them both because I like them both for different reasons.
Ok, since everybody's throwing out suggestions of their favorite audiobooks, I guess I'll toss out mine. The Hitchhiker's Guide series read by Douglas Adams is absolutely amazing -- it's pretty awesome to listen to DNA's take on what the characters should sound like, and his sense of comic timing in print is enhanced by his sense of comic timing in audio.
The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett are great in audio -- especially the "We Free Men" series, in which reading the mangled Nac-Mac-Feegle semi-Scots dialect can get tiresome. (The narrator's handling of it is masterful and sounds exactly like what I'd think a smurf raised on Highlander episodes and Braveheart would sound like.)
Finally, my library has a ton of stuff from "The Modern Scholar" and "The Teaching Company" -- and some of these are amazing. TTC's "History of Science" series is really compelling, and I'm going through a set of lectures on The Enlightenment at the moment. I'm your typical computer geek, so I probably wouldn't have broadened my horizons like this if it weren't for a chance encounter at the library.
I prefer it in some situations:
wouldn't the author have saved a lot in fees by going OGG, or is acceptance too much of a concern?
Yes, I think he would have lost lots of sales.
Most people won't have heard of ogg and there are still not that many players (sold!) that support them.
As long as not even the iPod supports ogg..
According to my understanding of the mp3 licensing terms,
he either has to pay nothing (revenue<100000$) or he (more likely the publisher) has to pay 2% of the related revenue (but at least 2000$/year).
If the licensee is a publisher that also sells other content as mp3, the 2% becomes relevant and might not matter that much:
even if you don't consider all the lost sales because of an "incompatible" format like ogg, they still save the pressing of CDs.
The "American Gods" MP3 CD sells for ~23$ at amazon.com, so there are about 46 cents licensing fee.
I don't know the number of CDs for the unabridged audio CD, but since the book has more than 600 pages it is likely to have 16 or more CDs (estimate based on the unabridged Harry Potter audio books that have 17-23 CDs).
So they have 46 cents to pay and about 15 CDs less to press/package/transport/store, also needing less space and having less weight..
So perhaps they even save a few cents (compared to the audio CDs) and I'm sure that there will be more sales compared to an ogg version
- and less trouble with angry never-heard-of-ogg-customers that can't get their discs to play.
semi-offtopic: as someone who prefers CD-based players to HD/flash players:
I guess there are no mp3 players with DVD-drives out there?
Can't be that hard to manufacture but I guess there isn't enough demand for disc based players or they would eat too much into the profits of small HD-players..
Years ago, I stumbled across a whole cache of audiobook-tapes that were dramatizations of short stories by Ray Bradbury. I'm not a big fan of Bradbury's writing - I think he has good ideas, but poor execution. In radio drama, however, that was completely turned around. His sci-fi horror/suspense makes for great radio. I wish I could remember the name or publisher, but it was great stuff.
:)
If you can dig up any of the old radio-dramas (The Shadow, War of the Worlds, Dimension X, etc.), it's well worth it. Poking around, I found this site, which seems to have quite a bit of classic radio drama at a decent price... I think some of these CDs will be going onto my Christmas wish-list
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
There are some Roger Zelazny books that were well done. Some were read by the author himself and some were done with multiple voice actors.
Currently I am listening to "The Swords of Night and Day" by David Gemmell. The voice actor doing the narrating is excellent.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Is it already a standard feature on all(fairly new) portable mp3 players to resume play on where you left off?
Would the player still remember after, say, 2 days?
I use an old archos(+rockbox) unit to listen to audio books. The original firmware does not have a resume feature. The resume feature is provided by the rockbox firmware.
I'm thinking of getting a smaller player but wonder if all new players have a resume feature.
They've had their time encouraging mass deforestation, supressing viable options and making money hand over fist while giving authors a pittance. Let them rot along with the RIAA/MPAA.
Some books work better on audio than others.
For me one kind even does better on audio than on paper for me (and i am being purely blasphemic here, as i worship books): I never was a fan of biographies. But on audio, spoken by the person in question, they do work.
I own as such:
"On writing, a memoir of the craft" by Stephen King
"Lucky Man" by Michael J Fox
According to prophecy
Well, the publisher's and author's number one concern is to sell copies. Anyone can play MP3 files on their digital audio player; not everyone can play OGGs. That would make up for the fees for using MP3, and then some.
One is much longer. Even if people pirated audiobooks, the time it would take to read them all and listen to them all would be prohibitive. I dont think book publishers really have that much to fear since major/popular books have already been converted to ebooks for many books and magazines are already pirated worldwide. Personlly I do not think they have much to worry about, books are huge investments of time, smaller books or quick reads may get hit a bit more but, larger books, no one could possibly have the time to appreciably dent the book publishing biz that much, after all knowledge and new books are constantly released and people understand that if they don't support the authors, etc, no more books of that calibre will be released. IMHO publishers need a good kick in the ass anyway because they release so much CRAP to begin with that is worthless (i.e. check out some beginning game programming books, or such like, WASTE of dead tree there) I really think credit should be given to the adult population, book piracy might seem like a money loser, but if todays kids take to electronic books, that will mean less dead tree's correct? Not to mention the cost to publish a book would be driven down enormously since the cost to produce the "physical" copy would be near zero, you'd still have to pay authors, and bandwidth costs fot distro, but things like bit-torrent would help alleviate costs, etc. IMHO I think many if not most of the books released, people dont NEED the whole book, just the parts they NEED. It's like buying music cd for 1-3 favorite songs and not liking/needing the rest, books have this same problem.
I thought Anansi Boys would be somehow a play on the term 'nancy boys', which means bluntly 'girly men', but it isn't.
When I've heard Neil pronounce his own name he says it pretty fast, as if it were one syllable -- no accent stressed anywhere. Maybe he's heard enough about it over the years and pronounces it that way for a reason, you'd have to ask him as I sure don't know. You might also wonder if Phillip K. Dick had issues with teasing kids. Or even Philippe Kahn being called a nut (p. kahn, get it?)
I highly recommend Anansi Boys, I'm halfway through it and it's as entertaining as Good Omens with considerably more imagination.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
He mentioned the MP3 CD on his website in early August. This doesn't seem to have been a "here's an announcement" post as so much as a "how did I miss that?!?!" post. Some quotes:
THE ANANSI BOYS is read by Lenny Henry who does a beautiful job voicing English characters of Carribean extraction among others. The first chapter (~17 Mb) is available from the Neil Gaiman site.
I saw the BBC's MP3 Hitchhiker's CD the other day.
... bigger.
The interesting thing is, although the content would fit easily on one CD, because it's only around 600MB, they chose to make it a two-CD set.
I guess they thought people would be more impressed with the "Seven hours of audio" they were buying if it looked
Free Culture is a surprising recommendation as an audiobook. I say that because some of the chapters are abysmally bad . . . A recorded performance does not have to be done in one take. Several readers flubbed lines and tried to recover as if performing live. For crying out loud, edit out the errors. I will say that I enjoyed the book, but errors like those (almost) made me want to record my own version of the offending chapters.
That's funny, I had almost exactly the same reaction, and the same impulse to record my own version! I agree, it's maddening to hear people muff their lines and just keep going, when audio editing isn't all that hard. However, I recommended it because a) it's free, b) I enjoyed it despite all the problems, and c) it occurs to me that while I've thought about recording a version, I've done nothing about it for months, while these people actually went ahead and did it -- that buys them some major props, in my book.
Besides, using the Creative Commons license to create an audiobook as a derivative work, then making that freely distributable over BitTorrent: now that's cool.
(But that doesn't mean you shouldn't learn to polish your reading! Even more off-topic than the rest of this, but actually the "Free Culture" audiobook is illustrative of something that I've often noted about amateur performing arts versus amateur technical arts like open source programming. The equivalent of flubbed lines in an open source project would be badly designed or sloppy code -- and in a good open source project, that's ruthlessly cut out, even if it means asking someone to leave the project. Whereas in "open source" culture, so far, there tends to be an attitude of "we must be supportive at all costs", which promotes a certain sloppiness, I think. I used to go to an open storytelling session where some people could have used some constructive criticism about their telling styles, but virtually never got it.)
The first audiobook on the Internet was Jim Cline's Science Fiction epic "A Small Percentage," originally broadcast abridged on AudioNet back in the 1995-1996 timeframe. This was a serialized dramatic audiobook, broadcast in RealAudio. The audio was later re-recorded and released unabridged in 42 thirty minute episodes on Broadcast.com in 1999, at the time, it was the "most listened to" audiobook on the Internet and had a huge cult following. In 2000 it was released on MP3 and Windows Media for download and on MP3 CD by Timberwolf Press (http://www.timberwolfpress.com/ and available direct or on Amazon.com. At Timberwolf we produced full-cast unabridged mystery, fantasy, science fiction, techno-thriller and military adventure audiobooks. These were/are complete with music and sound effects and were/are available on CD & MP3 CD as well as via download. - Patrick Seaman Publisher Emeritus Timberwolf Press http://www.patrickseaman.com/
MP3 audiobook rental at http://www.kitabe.com./ They mail them to you, along with a post-paid mailer to return them in. Variable monthly fee based on how many books you have out at a time, starts at $13/mo. Turn-around is about four days, since it goes by first class mail. I have a subscription, and love it.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
My main turnoff with MP3 is that it *sucks* at low bitrates, often found with audiobooks.
Re: the whole iPod doesn't support Vorbis schtick...
The iPod is mostly marketing IMO, if that mental-buffer-overflow-exploit of an ad campaign ever stops, iPods will sink like a rock popularity wise.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Big Finish make all sorts of audio drama, mostly Doctor Who and related, but lots of other stuff too. Judge Dredd, Sapphire and Steel etc. Check out WhoNA in the US who have a very large selection available.
Actually, it's Nashua that I'm in, and anyone who's sat in Rte3 hell trying to get to Lowell... Well, it's still rubbish. Turned what could have been a 1.5 hour commute into almost a 2.5 hour commute, in a train with poor environmental, and always in need of at least one more car.
--- no sig to see here... move along.
David Sedaris audio booksare at least 10 times funnier than their text counterparts. And though this might be a controversial position, The Daily Show's America: The Audiobook is, if not superior, equally as funny as the print version.