Creative Commons Audiobooks 138
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 is Ogg Vorbis? (Score:3, Informative)
From their site [vorbis.com]: "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:OoOoOoo! (Score:3, Informative)
Reg Free Link (Score:5, Informative)
AC
Re:OoOoOoo! (Score:5, Informative)
Read more. [telltaleweekly.com]
Re:what is Ogg Vorbis? (Score:1, Informative)
MOD PARENT DOWN
Re:what is Ogg Vorbis? (Score:4, Informative)
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:How about p.d. songs? (Score:2, Informative)
Not that cheap (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Already available (Score:5, Informative)
http://audiotreasure.com/ [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 (Score:3, Informative)
BTW: Linux on laptops for blind people [tuxmobil.org].
Re:what is Ogg Vorbis? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
$0.75 marked up three times (Score:3, Informative)
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 [mp3licensing.com]. 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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Natural Voices (Score:3, Informative)
Re:what is Ogg Vorbis? (Score:2, Informative)
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.