collaborative audio books
About a week and a half ago I stumbled onto AKMA's brilliant
idea
to create an audio-book version of Lawrence Lessig's new book "
Free Culture
". Bloggers quickly signed up to the collaborative by claiming chapters to read in the posting's comments.
I arrived a bit late to the party, so I didn't get to read a chapter, although there is plenty of room for alternative voices and reads, but that's for later.
I'm a big believer in audio books and 'read' this way frequently. I just finished Dan Brown's '
The DaVinci Code
' in about 2 week's time of travelling to my morning radio show whilst listeing in the car. I use my iPod and the
iTrip
, a snap-on fm-transmitter, so I can enjoy the reading on my car's stereo. It's also much safer.
I listen to lots of stuff on my iPod besides music and audio books. There are
interviews
and archives of old radio shows. There's even an
audio bible
.
Downloading these files and getting them onto my iPod was a tedious task. Clicking and waiting for hundreds of megabytes to be transferred just doesn't cut the mustard. Not at least, from a broadcaster's perspective. I believe there is a market for subscription based audio and video. As long as it requires no intervention from the user other than clicking the play button for instantaneous playback.
That's where
rss enclosures
come in. The concept results in a subscribable service that delivers new content to your news aggregator. Additional
'glue'
gets it onto the desired playback system automatically.
This is how I receive a new verse from the bible every day on my iPod. It's always there for me in the morning when I take my iPod from it's dock. No intervention required on my part. The same process can be created with video files that are sent to a TiVo.
Today I created an
rss feed
for the Free Culture audio-book project. Subscribing to it with an
enclosure aware aggregator
will download all the files you need to assemble the audio book.
A logical followup to this project would be more
multiple reader
audio books. These could be delivered in
one go
as with the Free Culture feed, or they could be by subscription, where a new chapter is delivered daily. Regardless of your reading pace, the content will always be there when you are ready for it, not the other way around.
Ofcourse non of this would have been possible without Lessig's gracious Creative Commons
license
.
This brings me to the
Project Gutenberg
. A collaborative project that catalogues the texts of books that are old enough to qualify as a part of the
public domain
.
Most
are 100 years old, but there are many extremely recognizable
titles
and
authors
. Many are classics that can still be enjoyed by new audiences today, as they have for decades. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Tom Swift
series
, which i read a a kid, are now in the public domain.
The Free Culture audio-book experiment showed me how quickly and efficiently this type of content can be produced, I am certain the model can be replicated with content from Project Gutenberg and hope to discuss this concept with others at
BloggerCon II
. |
rss enclosures growing
Andrew Cochran interviewed Dave Winer last year at a conference. A lot of the conversation is about "rss", specifically
enclosures
. Fun to see this 22 meg file had already downloaded and was sitting there waiting for me in my iPod when I awoke.
Marcus wrote a
script
for me last year that takes an rss enclosure that ends with .mp3 and automagically adds it to a special iPod playlist once it's been downloaded.
I've also been testing
Andrew's
BitTorrent glue. Works as advertised! |
journey to mars
A beautiful quicktime movie of the Spirit's journey to mars. |
are they crooked?
I
see
there's a few folks subscribed to my payload channel. An enclosure for y'all today. |
|