No NYT love for Podiobooks.com
I have got to get a better publicist. Or maybe actually get a publicist for Podiobooks.com. A great story ran on the NYT about Librivox, an excellent site where volunteers read works from the public domain. We currently have one of their titles (Anne of Green Gables) listed on Podiobooks.com and soon will have many more. The article also gave props to Telltale Weekly and the Spoken Alexandria project, plus a new site called LiteralSystems which I’d never heard of.
But no love for us here at Podiobooks.com. [sniff] I suppose I’ll live. Maybe when we break over the 100 free audio books number (should happen by the end of the year), then the press will show us a little affection. But in the meantime, we’ll keep bringing you as many free audio books in serialized form as we can!
August 30th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
That’s too bad… do you send out a press release every time there’s a new title added? Even if it’s just through PRWeb, it might be worth the effort
September 2nd, 2006 at 2:14 pm
Hey Evo maybe you can combine this thought of getting to over 100 books and your previous post on Creative Commons. Now that I have been over to LibriVox I see they have more than 250 items recorded. I’m guessing you could find enought there to get you over 100. What they don’t have that you do is a good podcasting scheme.
September 5th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
Well, I read the article, and more power to Hugh & co. for what they’re doing over at Librivox. Believe me, I’m always hungry for publicity for Mister Ron’s Basement myself. I have a press release coming out on 9/7/06 concerning my upcoming 500th (!) Episode of humorous public domain stories. While I do get thousands of downloads a day, I still haven’t been able to attract advertisers (yet).
While digging up stuff on gutenberg is a nice beginning, so far I’ve spent a bundle on very old books, and hundreds of hours of research time trying to get The Good Stuff. I believe I have succeeded in that & by keeping all my episodes available, I am building up a terrific library of our precious humor heritage.
If you haven’t listened to Mister Ron’s Basement lately, do check it out — there’s lots of funny stories there, and my delivery has improved a bit since the early efforts.
September 8th, 2006 at 2:59 pm
Big difference between podiobooks and libravox though. So far, most podiobooks are produced by the authors. They’re not in the public domain. Many are first novels, but they are all contemporary and the authors still hold the rights. As a blind person who gets pleasure reading exclusively from audiobook format and enjoys contemporary fiction, podiobooks are a huge boost to my listening experience. I’ve got a cd here with 10-15000 classics in .txt format that I can listen too via synthetic or digital speech, but I can’t find new current authors in the same way. That’s what podiobooks does for me, and so from my point of view, this project is more important than the libravox project, even if it isn’t as big… yet.