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.)
finally someone "gets it" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:OoOoOoo! (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Am I missing something? (Score:5, Insightful)
Selling the work cheaply until then pays for current and future bandwidth, hosting, and recording costs--and attracts more talent to the project.
Alex.
TTS is no substitute for audiobooks. (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:what is Ogg Vorbis? (Score:2, Insightful)
I like Ogg primarily because it's a better format, it compresses a bit better, is much more flexible, and has other usefull features.
Mycroft
Re:what is Ogg Vorbis? (Score:3, Insightful)
How much did it cost me? Let's say I paid $300 for my iPod; how much of that $300 went to the MP3 playback license?
This fails to address iTunes, of course. I didn't pay for that at all, and yet it includes a licensed MP3 encoder. So that doesn't quite add up.
What I'm getting at is this: the fact that Ogg doesn't cost anything to license doesn't matter to the end user. Not at all. So if you want to use Ogg as a selling point, you're going to have to come up with something better than "it's cheap."
Re:what is Ogg Vorbis? (Score:3, Insightful)
What I don't get is why they didn't choose Ogg Speex [speex.org], a codec that is similarly Free, but aimed especially at voice recordings.
Re:Neato... (Score:4, Insightful)
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nothing new under the sun.. Almost (Score:3, Insightful)
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.