Give Me Liberty or Death for 25 Cents
February 27, 2004 10:20 AM Subscribe
Telltale Weekly launched today. It's public domain meets Creative Commons meets Ogg Vorbis. Their mission is to build a free audiobook library of public domain texts. Four are available now, but Twain, Chekov Doctorow (Corry, not E.L.) and more are on the way.
In any case, I agree with Cory: this is a great idea. It's only natural that the Project Gutenberg texts make it into audio format.
posted by turbodog at 10:44 AM on February 27, 2004
posted by turbodog at 10:44 AM on February 27, 2004
This will be an awesome resource for teachers, I hope the word gets out about it.
posted by yeahyeahyeahwhoo at 11:07 AM on February 27, 2004
posted by yeahyeahyeahwhoo at 11:07 AM on February 27, 2004
Someone should tell grumblebee.
This is hott indeed, but still I wonder: $1/half hour seems like a lot. Not that I don't want the producers, readers and webhosts to get paid a fair amount, but a lot of recent unabridged audiobooks run for a good, oh, 12 hours. Maybe they're not looking at offering works of that length, but that's $24 -- almost exactly the same price as a pro work of that length from Amazon, which offers truly professional production/voice work and a hard copy.
I think an aggressive program of two-for-one, or something like it, would probably do them well.
posted by blueshammer at 12:06 PM on February 27, 2004
This is hott indeed, but still I wonder: $1/half hour seems like a lot. Not that I don't want the producers, readers and webhosts to get paid a fair amount, but a lot of recent unabridged audiobooks run for a good, oh, 12 hours. Maybe they're not looking at offering works of that length, but that's $24 -- almost exactly the same price as a pro work of that length from Amazon, which offers truly professional production/voice work and a hard copy.
I think an aggressive program of two-for-one, or something like it, would probably do them well.
posted by blueshammer at 12:06 PM on February 27, 2004
Could another way of doing this that might be lighter on the bandwidth would be to put up a good text-to-speech program, and encode the text file with different voices and intonations throughout with xml or summat?
posted by syscom at 12:08 PM on February 27, 2004
posted by syscom at 12:08 PM on February 27, 2004
syscom: since PG is the source for texts, you could do that for yourself now.
blueshammer: but, unlike the audiobook from Amazon, in 5 years it'll be in the public domain.
posted by turbodog at 1:09 PM on February 27, 2004
blueshammer: but, unlike the audiobook from Amazon, in 5 years it'll be in the public domain.
posted by turbodog at 1:09 PM on February 27, 2004
in 5 years it'll be in the public domain.
No, it will be released under a Creative Commons license, which is
not the same as being in the public domain. But yes, even the Creative Commons license is very different from the audiobook from Amazon.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 3:15 PM on February 27, 2004
No, it will be released under a Creative Commons license, which is
not the same as being in the public domain. But yes, even the Creative Commons license is very different from the audiobook from Amazon.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 3:15 PM on February 27, 2004
« Older I love Lucy | Only in nightmares do you have to do this with... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by turbodog at 10:38 AM on February 27, 2004