Open Content Alliance Conference

Post by **hugh** » October 25th, 2005, 9:55 pm

check:
http://openlibrary.org/

click on International Episode:
http://www.openlibrary.org/details/intlepisode00jamearch

then click on "listen".

if, like the 600 people in the conference room (from HP, Adobe, Apple, MSN, Wallstreet Journal etc), you gasp and burst into spontaneous applause, you can also pat yourself on the back for having made librivox pretty damn cool.

hugh.

BradBush · Post by **BradBush** » October 25th, 2005, 10:11 pm

Congrats to all. This is a great accomplishment.

Someone should record Brewster's intro book about what the Open Library is about. BTW, I listened to the Library of the Future series from Audible, and Brewster's session is my favorite. His vision of all of written history being digitized is pretty brave.

Brad

BradBush · Post by **BradBush** » October 25th, 2005, 10:21 pm

Several pages into the Brewster Intro book:

Audio Versions

Audio versions of classic books can be shared as easily as the images on the pages. It may be that a major use of the books in the Open Library will be to crate audiobooks.

A new group, LibriVox, is coordinating the readinig of classic literature by volunteers and offering the recordings in the public domain. They have recorded an Open Library book, The International Episode by Henry James, for the launch event, which has been integrated into the book display.

tis · Post by **tis** » October 25th, 2005, 11:17 pm

BradBush wrote:Someone should record Brewster's intro book about what the Open Library is about.

I know it's short, so it could be a solo effort, but why not get as many different people as possible to read one page each (without the normal intro and outro)? Then we can whack them together into a single file with lots of voices, which would kind of reflect what we are doing here...

Kristen · Post by **Kristen** » October 26th, 2005, 1:14 am

Wow, that looks (and is) great. I'm in for reading a page of Brewster's vision book. I'll even lead this one and edit everything together.

GordMackenzie · Post by **GordMackenzie** » October 26th, 2005, 5:37 am

Wow. Very cool.

I think we should jump on the other books currently available at the OpenLibrary project.

Dibs on Fenimore Cooper's "The Spy"!

GordMackenzie · Post by **GordMackenzie** » October 26th, 2005, 5:52 am

btw, BoingBoing has an article covering the OpenLibrary.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/10/26/library_of_public_do.html

However, I believe they incorrectly state that the OpenLibrary uses "text to speech" technology.

I wrote a quick note to Cory suggesting that this was not true, and that the audio is actually provided by volunteers such as the Librivox project. I wrote an email directly to him... I'm not sure if that is the appropriate way to submit corrections/comments on items in BoingBoing, but we'll see...

g/

Post by **hugh** » October 26th, 2005, 6:09 am

i'm going to ask brewster et al to highlight our participation a bit more clearly on the site etc.

hugh.

kayray · Post by **kayray** » October 26th, 2005, 8:09 am

Man that's so cool -- click the "listen" button and there's Alex! :)

Gord, where are you seeing the Cooper book? I feel like I'm missing something... I can't find a list of their books, just the clickable images. The site _looks_ awesome but I'm hoping they'll improve it to make it more easily navigable.

Also they need to mention Librivox in giant font ;-)

Kara

kayray · Post by **kayray** » October 26th, 2005, 8:14 am

Gord, emailing Cory worked! He fixed the boingboing post :) :) :)

Squiddhartha · Post by **Squiddhartha** » October 26th, 2005, 8:42 am

Hugh, this is excellent, and should be posted to the main Librivox page so the world can hear (literally!) about it!

GordMackenzie · Post by **GordMackenzie** » October 26th, 2005, 9:05 am

As for the Cooper book.. you have to search for it.

I think the current page is just a teaser, and not meant to be a finished product.

Cooper's "The Spy" is the plain beige cover directly to the left of the large "International Episode" cover and above "The moccasin ranch". It's not labelled in any way (although there is an alt-tag).

Good on Cory for the update!!!

g/