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| Interview with LibriVox founder Hugh McGuire |
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| Sunday, May 28, 2006 |
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| The LibriVox website features a catalog of about a hundred completed books, including books in other languages like German, Hebrew, and Japanese. |
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| Why did you decide to take the acoustic fate of public domain works into your own hands, and how did you go about it? |
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| I think that a vibrant public domain is very important to a healthy world, and so I thought: here's a way to help the cause. |
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| I launched LibriVox, emailed some friends and some podcasters who where doing literary stuff, and invited them to record a chapter of Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent. |
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| Things have grown steadily since. |
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| By the way, AKMA was the first guy I know of to do something like this, with Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture. |
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| That, I think, started my thinking about this, but it took a while for the idea to crystallize. |
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| Hugh McGuire with some books that have not yet been acoustically liberated. |
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| Do you personally record audiobooks, and did you already do so before LibriVox? |
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| LibriVox was my first experience recording audiobooks. |
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| I still do the odd chapter, but i am a bit delinquent in finishing some of them these days! |
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| Is there a particular LibriVox book which you think stands out because of the quality, the overall effort involved, its popularity, or for some other reason? |
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| My personal favourite is Notes from the Underground (Dostoyevsky). |
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| Other random good ones: |
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| Austen, Jane. |
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| Pride and Prejudice |
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| Christie, Agatha. |
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| The Mysterious Affair at Styles |
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| London, Jack. |
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| White Fang |
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| Macaulay, Thomas Babington. |
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| History of England (Volume 1, Chapter 1) |
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| Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. |
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| The Communist Manifesto (solo) |
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| Twain, Mark. |
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| A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (solo) |
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| Ed.: See the LibriVox catalog for a full index. |
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| Browsing the catalog, I find that the quality of the spoken audio varies greatly from text to text or even from chapter to chapter. |
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| If someone wanted to re-record a chapter because they didn't like the speaker, would you then offer two versions? |
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| Yes. |
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| We take the Wikipedia approach: if you think it should be better, please help it be so. |
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| You'll note we offer a couple of versions of some books. |
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| Indeed our weekly poetry project celebrates this diversity of voice: each week a new short poem is chosen and as many readers as wish to record a version, so you get 20 + versions of the same poem, a very interesting audio experience. |
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| Besides works whose copyright has expired, there is an increasing number of modern books available under Creative Commons and similar licenses. |
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| You mentioned Larry Lessig's Free Culture, but it also includes some out of print titles by publishers who are open to the concept, such as O'Reilly. |
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| Do you want to limit the scope of LibriVox strictly to old public domain works, or do you have plans to include recent works under reasonably permissive licenses as well? |
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| We are only doing public domain works, for a number of reasons, partly to keep simplicity in our copyright situation -- public domain means its as simple as can be. |
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| CC makes things more complex. |
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| Also, there are other sites, notably podiobooks.com, which are better suited to CC works than LibriVox. |
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| we find it makes things clear and easy to say: published works, public domain, and leave it at that. |
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| As far as I can tell, podiobooks.com features 'free as in beer' content — material which you can download, but which isn't under a free content license. |
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| Instead of 'public domain', wouldn't 'free content' work just as well, using something like the Free Content Definition to limit the scope? |
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| This needs more discussion obviously: we chose public domain because the texts we use are public domain and we didn't want to add new restrictions, especially not non-commercial, since already our recordings are being used for a number of commercialish projects (I can't recall any specific project names, but some pay-education sites use LV stuff). |
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| That's good and well and fine with us. |
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| We don't want to have to give anyone permission to use our recordings, we want anyone to use them for whatever they want. |
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| Also, for the thing to work you need to have many dedicated volunteers willing to do the management (onerous) and many willing to do the reading. |
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| While Pride and Prejudice will attract many readers, I don't know about O'Reilly's latest tome on XML ... though I might be wrong. |