Adam Curry: Free Culture

collaborative audio books

Sat, 03 Apr 2004 17:34:19 GMT

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.