From Open Knowledge Foundation

Open Audiobooks

Aim: to build up a library of freely-downloadable audio-books.

Method: open collaboration on the OSS model.

Started:: 2005-01-14

Status: Retired (2007-01). Since first proposed 2 years ago this task has been done by others such as librevox. Therefore it is no longer necessary for us to work on it.

• choose an initial title: out of copyright, seminal, short; and parcel it into sections, eg chapters.
• design a webpage where contributors can see which sections of the book remain unread, and can post their contributions.
• design a governance/moderation regime.
• give the project a good name
• invite contributors and publicise.

Issues:

• storage/bandwidth. At www.audiobooksforfree.com the only files available for free are at 8 kbps. The quality is intolerable, but even at that speed half an hour represents a 2-3 mb file.
• open formats. Ogg Vorbis files would be ideal, but how will this impact on
• ease of access for non-technical contributors. Success would depend on very low start-up barriers for new contributors.

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