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.)
How about p.d. songs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Am I missing something? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:OoOoOoo! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:what is Ogg Vorbis? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
[much ranting]
I read it twice, but I guess I missed the part where you answered the question. I don't pay to use either my iPod or iTunes; both include MP3 encoding and playback. (Also AAC, which I also don't pay for.) So why should I give a damn that Ogg is free? It's not easier to use (it's considerably harder), it's not demonstrably superior (it's a wash at best), so what's the big whoop?
(I know what the argument is for OEM's and whatnot. I'm trying to get at what the argument is for end-users. Or, if that doesn't work, convince you to stop trying to tout Ogg as some kind of competitive advantage all by itself and to concentrate on the stuff that actually matters.)
Duh, Have you listened to new music? (Score:4, Interesting)
Neato... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
great idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Audiobooks have completely changed my reading habits over the past few years. I now read several books each week, during exercise, driving here and there, etc.
The trouble would be to find talented readers (as a previous post pointed out), but if it required a minimal download fee to hire good readers (or let them quit their day job), I'd certainly support that.
I currently pay $50/month for a membership at Talking Book World, which has a lot of titles, though their selection is fairly light on nonfiction and technical subjects.
Re:TTS is no substitute for audiobooks. (Score:3, Interesting)
You could use a distributed proofreaders approach to tag text for different voices. Then you could do voice synthesis using different voices for different parts.
I agree that this is in no way a real substitute for audiobooks. However, this has the potential of being able to be done freely, or close to it.
Real audiobooks will be difficult to ever make free, since they require huge contributions by a few individual actors, plus a load of editing which is difficult to distribute (and the skills for which are not as widespread as the simple ability to proofread).
Re:TTS is no substitute for audiobooks. (Score:3, Interesting)
I once ran Orwell's 1984 through text-to-speech; the flat coldness of the artificial voice made it pretty damn bleak. COOL! Just what I was going for! Next up, William Gibson's Idoru. I need to get a list of cyberpunk futuristic thrillers to sterilize with TTS.
Look at it this way: I'm just ahead of the curve -- give it twenty years, and hopefully all our new wives will sound like that.. heh heh.
Nice idea, but you're probably already paying (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Natural Voices (Score:3, Interesting)
As long as the author isn't inconsiderate enough to write sentence longer than 30 words...
But, before this egregarious misapplication of provisionally available proprietary technology commences, does anyone know what good, free (as in speech and beer) text-to-voice tools are available?
Free non-book, spoken word (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the oral arguments to the most important Supreme Court cases are available as MP3's from Oyez.com [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 [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.
Why Vorbis is important. (Score:3, Interesting)
With open source software however, it is impossible to keep track of how many copies have been distributed because anyone is free to modify or redistribute the software. This pretty much makes it illegal to write an open source mp3 player/encoder, since it is impossible to meet the terms of the patent license.
There is an exception for educational and research purposes. However, if a project leader declares in his license that software is for educational purposes only, then he has covered his ass, but the legality problem has now shifted to his users - all the people that use the software for comercial or personal use are now breaking the law. Besides, the reason most of us release our software as open source isn't so people can learn from it, but so it will be usefull to people. We don't want to create a wonderfull collection of software which can only be marvelled at and not put to use. The GPL recognises this and actually prohibits people from further restricting who can use derived works (ie for non-comercial use, non-nuclear use etc).
So the first point is that if we want to follow the law, we don't have a choice but to drop mp3 and make something better. And it really is better to follow the law. One might say "But they have never sued open source developers, you are making a big deal out of nothing". To which I reply "I will trust them not to sue me when I it on paper". You are putting yourself in a bad situation to trust people to play nice. Especially when these people (proprietary software companies and music cartels) are becoming increasingly hostile to open source.
The second point is that it is better for the end user as well. The documents you create and lawfully recieve from others are your own. It is wrong for someone to restrict your access to your files, but this sort of lock-in is exacly what proprietary and patent encumbered file format create. In my opinion, proprietary file formats are a much larger problem than proprietary software.
Plays and books on the BBC (Score:3, Interesting)
The current Book at Bedtime [bbc.co.uk] (GMT and not streaming live) is Jane Eyre and there are Plays, Short Stories and Soaps [bbc.co.uk] too. Contemporary and classic.
All content is free -- paid for by the British taxpayer :)
-DK-
Re:Natural Voices (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm there (Score:5, Interesting)
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