TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘podcasting + video + so on’ Category

By Joe Wikert, a VP in the Professional/Trade division of John Wiley & Sons

Literary Video’s tagline is “Creating Multimedia Content that Sells Books.”  I discovered this service last month and exchanged a couple of e-mails with David Woodard, founder and creative director.

With the ever increasing importance of video in the publishing world, I jumped on the opportunity to do a blog interview with David.  Here’s what he had to say about Literary Video and what it’s up to:

JW: You had been working for a publisher in Nashville for awhile and decided to launch this new business venture, Literary Video.  What’s your vision for the business and what drove you to create this start-up?

DW: Working in book marketing for eight years taught me many things, but one of the most impressive things I learned was that the best salesman for a book is almost always the author. There are exceptions to this, but by in large it is true.

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By David Rothman

The nuking of Los Angels is the topic of the latest podcast series from J. Marcus Xavier, who earlier gave us The Silent Universe.

“It’s my first non-scifi effort on the web: a character drama set to the aftermath of a nuclear explosion in Los Angeles,” he tells us, and a quick sample from the opener suggests he put a lot of soul into it.

First episode is free, and then you pay for the rest. I hope JMX will check in with us later on and tell us how the project fares. Good luck on this!

“The Silent Universe has an audience of over 3,000 listeners,” JMX says, “and I’ve been mentioned in Netsurfer Digest, on AMC TV’s website, and in Sci Fi Channel’s Science Fiction Weekly.”

Your thoughts, gang? Should JMX use pay or the advertising model or maybe a mix?

And just to brighten your day: Enriched uranium seized at border: Material suitable for ‘dirty bomb,’ say Slovaks, in The Budapest Times. 

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By Branko Collin

Almost two years ago I encouraged TeleBlog readers to go and watch the building of the LibriVox boom-town. LibriVox is a project that lets volunteers create human-read audio books. Well, apparently the “town” now has its own radio station, and in celebration of the site’s second birthday on August 10, the LibriVox Community Podcast people interviewed founder Hugh McGuire for their 48th podcast.

Some of the things that have happened to LibriVox are the record-breaking months of March and July, when 70 and 72 audio books were produced respectively. The project more than doubled its output in the second year, going from 256 audio books for the first year to 546 for the second. Project Gutenberg started posting LibriVox versions of its e-texts. The thousandth reader helped read a book for LibriVox in April this year. Interestingly, the LibriVox forum has over 5,000 registered users, four times the current number of readers. Some of those are blind proof-listeners.

Exactly two years ago I posted a small bit about LibriVox here, and intrigued by the project decided to help out with a chapter of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. This week Jim Mowatt of the LibriVox Community Podcast asked me to talk a bit about that experience. You can find my contribution in the podcast, of course (at 40:30), and in text form below the fold.

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By Carol Jurd

Podcasts—it’s hard not to get addicted to them. All those wonderful programs from the BBC, book-readings from Librivox, music information from Naxos Music. Just download and transfer them to MP3 player and listen away. You can buy various devices to listen on your car radio, and then you can easily download to your phone.

Or can you? Could it be that podcast come with usability hassles, just as e-books do?

The audio wars

My MP3 player, a SanDisk Sansa, interfaces perfectly with Windows Media player (WMP). But WMP has no facility for downloading podcasts. ITunes has an excellent podcast downloading system, but it takes a disdainful attitude to my SanDisk, refusing to recognize it at all. Fair enough, Apple wrote the program for its iPods. I have tried Juice, several times, but it seems to have no interface with anything.

Well, I could use the RSS feed in Internet Explorer, but it simply saves the MP3 files as “123xyzblog.mp3″ or something equally unintelligible. At least iTunes saves files with names that make sense. At the moment I download in iTunes, then let WMP “find” the files on my computer, then download to the MP3 device. Mercifully, the wonderful Librivox audio book site lets me download direct and gives the audio files recognizable names, so I can bypass all of the above!

Like our e-book woes

This situation sounds very much like our e-book woes. Podcasts are free, like public domain books, so perhaps some companies that want to sell MP3 music downloads, movie downloads and books are not be interested in making life easier for us to use any free material that is available. We might all wish for devices that let us read in HTML, PDF and a handful of the most common formats, but this is just not happening to the extent it should. At least podcasts usually come in MP3 format and can be heard on any computer or portable player, despite download woes.

I do wish one of the players like Yahoo or Google would design some better software for both e-books and podcast downloading. Also an advertising opportunity lost—getting feedback on the users’ tastes must be worth something. Amazon.com certainly doesn’t let the information about my book purchases go to waste; in fact, it provides pages of “recommendations” every time I visit the site (which is quite often, as I like having the books filtered this way).

Open Culture as a guide

If you would like to explore the “Podcast” world, I would highly recommend Open Culture’s site. Open Culture lists and reviews many sites offering audio books, university lectures, language lessons and so on.

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By David Rothman

Polls Archive

“If you subscribe to the notion of the ‘attention economy,’ and agree that books now compete not only with films and television for cultural relevance and interest, but now must also beat out new media such as blogs, MP3s, Myspace and Youtube for human bandwidth,” says Jeff Gomez, a Web-oriented marketer for Holtzbrinck in his personal Print Is Dead blog, “then why shouldn’t authors use every marketing tool at their disposal?” So, gang, what do you think? Vote, then perform via a comment if you’d like.

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By Chris Meadows

Not too long ago, author John Scalzi posted on his blog about a new website he was helping to launch: ficlets.com. (See my earlier TeleRead post about it.) The purpose of ficlets.com is similar to a well-known writing exercise in which one person writes part of a story, and then someone else gets to continue it. Ficlets uses a content management system to extend and expand this exercise: each ficlet is a maximum of 1024 characters in length, anyone can write a sequel or prequel to any ficlet, and any ficlet can have as many prequels or sequels as people want to write. All ficlets are released under a creative commons license to make sure that people have the right to continue what is written or make use of it in other venues.

Since the site’s launch, there have been literally thousands of ficlets, and many interesting and amusing stories that have come out of them. I have even taken advantage of the creative commons license to read some of these ficlets aloud as podcasts.

Now, I am delighted to announce that on Saturday, June 9th at 7:30 p.m. Eastern/4:30 p.m. Pacific, I will be conducting a live call-in talk radio interview with ficlets.com site administrator Kevin Lawver on my books-and-writing-related talk show, The Biblio File. The topic of the interview will be what ficlets.com is, where the idea came from, and how it has been doing so far. After I finish my prepared questions, I will bring in any callers for a panel discussion.

Anyone who wishes to call in to the show to listen or participate will be welcome to do so. Here’s how.

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By Chris Meadows

The next edition of The Biblio File will be this Sunday, June 3rd, at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. We’ll talk for an hour or two about recent developments in the world of books and ebooks. Scheduled topics for discussion include

And callers are free to propose discussion of topics of interest to
them as well.

http://terrania.us/biblio/ to call in.
http://terrania.us/talkshoe/ for advice on how to do it.

Hope I’ll see you there!

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By Chris Meadows

Earlier today, on my podcast The Biblio File, I hosted a two and one half hour interview with Dave Howell, the founder of early commercial e-book site Alexandria Digital Literature. We covered a great deal of territory, but here is a summary of some of the more interesting points.

Dave originally had the idea for the Alexlit book recommender application while in high school, but shelved it when he couldn’t think of a way to get enough people around the same PC. Over a decade later, the Internet and the music-recommendation site that later became Firefly inspired him to revisit the idea in conjunction with a business venture of some kind. After the idea of selling paper books on-line was pre-empted by Amazon.com, Dave turned to the “futuristic” idea of selling books electronically and founded Alexlit.

Alexlit originally sold its stories without DRM encryption largely because there were no forms of DRM available at the time; MobiPocket and Peanut Press had yet to come along. Instead, the site featured a “copyright quiz” that prospective customers had to pass successfully in order to be allowed to purchase, and also watermarked downloaded files with the purchaser’s name. Howell noted that over Alexlit’s entire history, he never found any examples of an Alexlit work that was subsequently “pirated.”

E-books and stories purchased from Alexlit could be downloaded in HTML, “Rocket flavored” HTML, Palm AportisDoc, and PDF (in varieties formatted for printing or formatted for screen reading). Howell noted that downloads were pretty evenly distributed among all four formats. This was made possible by the Rosetta Machine, an application which used a single HTML-like parent format (”Nile”) to create alternate versions on the fly. This avoided the time and effort that could potentially be spent converting each new work into every different flavor. And as future-proofing, it could easily be extended to convert into any new format that might come along.

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By Chris Meadows

As a reminder, today, Sunday, May 27th at 1 p.m. Eastern/10 a.m. Pacific, I will be conducting a live call-in talk radio interview with Alexandria Digital Literature founder Dave Howell on my book-related talk show, The Biblio File. The topic of the interview will be primarily Alexlit’s original founding and imminent return, but I will also talk about the ebook industry in general and how it has changed since Alexlit was founded. After I finish my prepared questions, I will bring in any callers for a panel discussion.

Anyone who wishes to call in to the show to listen or participate will be welcome to do so.

I’ve written a comprehensive page on the various methods of connecting to TalkShoe at that covers in detail all the ways to listen or participate, but I will summarize below.

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By David Rothman

David Faucheux is a blind librarian, an old-fashioned book lover in Lafayette, Louisiana, who, to the disgrace of his profession, has not found steady work.

My friend holds an MLIS, has reviewed fiction and nonfiction in Library Journal, belongs to Phi Beta Kappa and a library honor society, and is eager to learn. But face it, he’s more comfortable tearing apart the plots of historical novels than doing, say, Web-based reference work.

Hope lingers, though. Mostly for the joy of it, but also for the purposes of building a portfolio, David does TeleRead’s Blind Chance blog—enriched by dozens of his audio commentaries on topics ranging from a Tom Wolfe book to recollections of the late and great Nader, his Guide Dog.

Zapped or just out of commission? No audios, not even related icons, on Blind Chance

But wait. For the past few days, David and I have not been able to call up the audio commentaries which he entrusted to the care of Audioblogger. Imagine the damage to Blind Chance, full of Audioblogger links. The entire Audioblogger site, in fact, is gone without an explanatory page at audioblogger.com—yes, that’s an old screen shot you see.

In fairness to Odeo, Audioblogger’s owners at the time of the shutdown, let me note that bloggers got a warning last fall. “MP3s made with the service will continue to be hosted and served but you will no longer be able to use Audioblogger to post new audio.”

Sounds reasonable. But for now at least, audioblogger.com has been shut down despite the above claim that the MP3s would “continue to be hosted.” All along, I had urged David to find a backup service after I helped set him up with the audio blog on May of 2004, with the first post appearing on Mary 13, 2004, almost three years ago, exactly. A Louisiana university near David, alas, seems to have ignored my pleas that his oft-memorable commentaries were of interest as social history and blind history. (more…)

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By Chris Meadows

I am delighted to announce that tonight, Monday, April 23rd at 10 p.m. Eastern/7 p.m. Pacific, I will be conducting a live call-in talk radio interview with prolific fantasy author Mercedes Lackey and her “Secret World Chronicle” writing partner Steve Libbey on my book-related talk show, The Biblio File. The topic of the interview will be primarily the “Secret World Chronicle” podiobook series, but I will also ask some more generalized questions about Misty’s career and points of view. After I finish my prepared questions, Misty will take questions from the audience.

Anyone who wishes to call in to the show to listen or participate will be welcome to do so.

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By David Rothman

So—beyond the usual pleasures of text—why would you want to buy Scott Sigler’s books if you can hear the related podcasts for free?

In the context of Infested, Scott personally explains in a comment to the TeleBlog. He’s already rewritten Infested, “using a log of what I learned while podcasting it. The new version is much stronger, has new science, and sets up the sequel Contagious.” And, yes, the podcast freebies will go on.

Related: Horror NOT! Podcaster Scott Sigler snags $500K+ three-book deal with Crown. Hey, what’s a book-related blog without some grubby talk about money? Actually the size of Scott’s deal is newsworthy since it may reflect one of the most successful implementations of the e-free/p-paid model—except that the medium was podcasting rather than Doctorow-style text-giveaways. This model definitely isn’t for all. But I’m glad it’s an option at least. (more…)

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