Hi Hugh,
I just thought I'd throw in a few ideas which might help to make Librivox cheaper to run.
My understanding is that the file hosting for works in progress is expensive. From what I've seen of the process not much processing is done on the files until the book gets to the cataloguing stage, what's needed is a secure place to store a large volume od MP3 files in the year to two years many books take to complete.
I was wondering if it might be workable to use a file upload service for this, and work on devising a simple way to transfer the completed files to the Librivox servers when it is time for cataloguing.
There are some free services which seem to be easy to use and which don't impose storage limits. Some examples include
http://www.mediafire.com/tour.php and
http://www.filehosting.org/ but there are others.
Most of these services are Web GUI based services, I'm not sure if any of them have useful APIs (which would make it easier to e.g. integrate them into the catalog system). So on, non free, but reasonably priced option, might be to use Amazon S3 storage (
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/) which for 100Gb would cost $15 a month. There are data transfer costs also which would at least double the yearly cost. The advantage is that it is really easy to access this remote storage from applications, there are APIs for lots of languages.
You'd still need local storage for the database, but hopefully the cost would be a lot lower as it wouldn't need as much storage as the bulky /mp3 files do.
Another option also from Amazon would be their Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2 for short (
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/) which basically gives you a VM and you can run as many as you need to handle your traffic but only pay for as many as you run. The small system sounds like it would cover the needs described ("Small Instance (Default) 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of local instance storage, 32-bit platform") and would cost around $750 a year. As it's a VM the Librivox sysadmin would have root access to that VM.
Yet another option might be to use a hosted social network, like Ning where you can highly customise it. This would provide forums but also a lot of social functionality which might be very useful for a vibrant community like Librivox. Here's a sample based on just a few minutes work (
http://book-readers.ning.com/), obviously with more time and effort it could be more heavily customised to the look you'd like and to add the features you like (Ning comes with hundreds of Ning apps which can be added with a click - Google Docs integration, Box.Net, TokBox video chat
, WordPress etc. You don't have to have a ning.com domain.
One final option would be to move to something like Google AppEngine. This would be a lot of work as basically you'd have to rewrite all the back end code from scratch, but you'd have full control over the functionality. On costs it says "Every Google App Engine application will have enough CPU, bandwidth, and storage to serve around 5 million monthly pageviews for free. You can purchase additional resources at competitive prices when you need them and you'll pay only for what you use.". See
https://appengine.google.com.
All the best,
Padraig
