Last week Adam wrote about the idea of collaborating to create audio books.
collaborative audio books
About a week and a half ago I stumbled onto AKMA's brilliant idea to create an audio-book version of Lawrence Lessig's new book "Free Culture". Bloggers quickly signed up to the collaborative by claiming chapters to read in the posting's comments.I arrived a bit late to the party, so I didn't get to read a chapter, although there is plenty of room for alternative voices and reads, but that's for later.
I'm a big believer in audio books and 'read' this way frequently. I just finished Dan Brown's 'The DaVinci Code' in about 2 week's time of travelling to my morning radio show whilst listeing in the car. I use my iPod and the iTrip, a snap-on fm-transmitter, so I can enjoy the reading on my car's stereo. It's also much safer.
I listen to lots of stuff on my iPod besides music and audio books. There are interviews and archives of old radio shows. There's even an audio bible.
[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
I've been listening to audio books a bit more lately now that I'm driving up and back to Boston all the time. It can be a nice way to make the almost two hour drive go by quickly. I just finished the second Dark Tower book and have started in on Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot. But there are some books that aren't in audio format that I wish were. Adam brings up the point that there are lots of books in Project Gutenberg that would provide a good starting point (specifically mentioning the Tom Swift books).
Adam has some ideas about distributing the books that are recorded, but I've been thinking about this from another direction. Having a site for managing and tracking what books are being worked on. A page where users can register and then sign up for chapters of books and upload them when done. I have some other related ideas of letting people rate readers and chapters of books, since more than one person might upload a chapter. I wish I was going to be in town for BloggerCon II so I'd have a chance to chat about this with him, but I'll be stuck down in Hartford. I may just start coding up something for some php practice in the meantime.
