PG, DP and makin' connections

[Cori]

First off, please excuse me bouncing madly round the place like a three-year-old with a sugar rush ... I haven't had this much fun since TalkLikeAPirateDay! And I apologise if my question is patiently answered in the FAQ ... I did read it, but I can't guarantee it didn't go in one eye and out the other - you know how things are sometimes

So, LibriVox is reading mainly PG (Project Gutenberg) books ... is there a link from the PG page to the file here..? I know there are some books already produced in audio format at PG, and was wondering if the presence of the LibriVox intro in the file meant that they couldn't be so 'directly' connected. The LibriVox files are stored at the Internet Archive - I confess I don't know much about their overlaps ... are PG books stored there too..? That is to say ... if someone looks at Dracula at Gutenberg in six months time - will they be able to see that there is a free reading of it here too..?

Also, a bit of shameless advertising! Distributed Proofreaders are now the main provider of eBooks to PG (not the only one, but the top one, number-wise.) We recently formalised a way for books which have passed *almost* all the way through the site to be 'smooth-read' ... that is, downloaded much as you would do from PG ... so that final errors in the text can be queried before posting. Anyone who wants to give this a go is very welcome to do so - the instructions and listing page can be found here. You don't need to sign up to the site to download books - only if you want to mark some errors and return it for checking. The selection changes regularly, depending on what books DP has nearly finished processing.

My little dream is to see lots of books whistling out from there, over here, being read, and then uploaded a few weeks later - new text and new audio together. Which would be super fun, I reckon! Not that anyone's necessarily going to race to record essays on Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism or the Scientific American, February 18, 1888 Supplement ... but ... well. It's a thought, anyway. Hence my question about how this all WORKS.

Oh, and yes, if anyone was curious, I do go on at DP like this from time to time ... here's me enthusing in the DP forums about LibriVox.

[hugh]

hey cori. the short answer is "sort of." ... and the editorial is: I am exited to have had your interest ...

in fact I contacted DP (something like help@dp or something) but no response, so having an internal DPer jump in like this is fantastic.

re: gutenberg, early in the project I was in contact with Greg Newby CEO there, and he was very positive about librivox. ... since then I've sent a couple of emails with no response, but I plan on following up again, shortly. like tomorrow!

we seem to be growing at an exciting rate (30% increase in volunteers in the past week) so our capacity to handle the "smooth reading" ideas you outline, I hope, will grow too ... if there are readers willing then we're happy to help manage it.

On that note, we are actively developing more sensible uploadiing and cataloging technology, which will help taking on more crazy (!) projects like the one you suggest.

Our stated objective is: alll the books in the public domain, and we'll need help to get there so we're pretty happy to have you on board!

hugh.

[kayray]

Cori, I gotta say I love your enthusiasm! That's how I feel about librivox, but I try to tone it down a little so I don't frighten people! You and I and the other nutty obsessive ones can be giddy together :)

Kara

[Cori]

Cool, cool, cool, thanks Hugh!

I was trying to work out, you see, how my dear Candy Rabbit fitted in between the two projects ... whether I hand the files over to the DP book's processor to upload when she sends off the text and HTML, or whether I save them here, with your introductory note at the start of each section, or both ... or something else entirely. Oh, and for The Raven too, which y'all have finished and I've cross-promoted at DP, since a new edition of that is just going through currently, and ... yes ... the connections aren't apparent.

Possibly a way to get good answers is to ask things that almost entirely aren't questions - have an idea in your head of how things could work, and then ask a pointy question that leads to that. Might be previous inquiries were too open-ended ... leading to the "of course we'd love to have all our books audio'd" type answer, which doesn't say much about the concrete method of doing that and making it public. Just a FWIW


T'was your enthusiastic writing about LibriVox and your chapters of Five Children and It that caught my randomly Googling attention, Kara ... thankyou for going public. Hoorah for Nutty Obsessives!