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Poster:	Roland Wolf	Date:	Dec 15, 2003 8:38am
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Audio-Books at Gutenberg

I listened to the new audio-book "The Sign of Four" which is a human read product. It is so much nicer to listen to a human voice than to the other audio-books which were produced with a digital text-to-speech converter.
While a bitrate of 16kbps is sufficient for a computer read book, for a human read book it is probably too low. Compression artefacts limit the fidelity and roboterise the reader. There may be bandwidth considerations - given the effort to produce such an audio-book a higher bit-rate could be justified . An improvement can be achieved also by using the free Vorbis compression which offers a better sound quality at low bitrates. Vorbis is also considered to be more "political correct" since it is not loaded which so much patent and licensing threats.
Your comments are appreciated.

Roland Wolf

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Poster:	brewster	Date:	Dec 15, 2003 1:49pm
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

we, at the archive, would love to have more audio books, and at high bitrates. we would transcode to lower bitrates for those that dont have the bandwidth, but at least the archival copy would be high rez.

is there a volunteer community for making audio books we can tap into?

-brewster

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Poster:	Laridar	Date:	Feb 24, 2009 2:31pm
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

www.Emusic.com is definately the best place for Audiobooks simply because it's not loaded with spam like every other site.

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Poster:	Xarroc	Date:	Mar 6, 2009 2:22pm
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

Hey finally I have found someone else who uses emusic.com. Yes, I would have to agree with you, emusic is most assuredly a reliable site for great audio books

This post was modified by Xarroc on 2009-03-06 22:22:11

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Poster:	Jerry Kipler	Date:	May 16, 2009 8:51am
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

Xarroc? What a peculiar name. Wait a sec, is that like Zar'roc from Eragon and those books? Those are make some outstanding audiobooks by the way.

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Poster:	Jerry Kipler	Date:	May 16, 2009 8:51am
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

Xarroc? What a peculiar name. Wait a sec, is that like Zar'roc from Eragon and those books? Those are make some outstanding audiobooks by the way.

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Poster:	Jerry Kipler	Date:	May 16, 2009 8:56am
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

Xarroc? What a peculiar username. Wait a sec, is that like the Zar'roc from Eragon and those books? They make for some [url=http://www.emusic.com/audiobooks/index.html]outstanding audiobooks[/url] by the way.

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Poster:	betatrom	Date:	Aug 27, 2007 9:23pm
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

I’d like to post a suggest BooksShouldBeFree.com, a site I found that is very well laid out. It has only around 100 eBooks but they are the 100 most popular books in the public domain. Also, the site has photos of every book so you can be sure of what you're downloading. As the website's name suggests (BooksShouldBeFree.com), all mp3 audio book downloads are free.

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Poster:	jasonjuicer	Date:	Jan 27, 2009 3:05pm
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

I don't know of any free site other than the sites listed, but you can get one free audio book from eMusic. Don't know if that helps a lot, but I thought I might mention it.

http://www.emusic.com/audiobooks/index.html

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Poster:	MusicalTales.com	Date:	Feb 15, 2009 8:59am
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

I'm a composer and a writer.
It took me two years, most of my money and energy to built this very innovative and ambitious project and I would be really happy to have your opinion.
This is a MUSICAL FANTASY AUDIO BOOK free download
Please take a minute of your time to have a look for yourself:
http://www.musicaltales.com

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Poster:	bookguyy	Date:	Mar 23, 2008 2:49pm
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

i've had bad experiences with free downloads. the quality at least for me and more importantly the selection isn't ver good. i typically go here for my kids. can't really beat their prices. well, not true. if you get it for free then obviously the price has been beat. i just hate looking for a book and not being able to find. normally don't have the problem here

http://www.childrenbookstoday.com/index.php?c=17&x=Audio_Books

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Poster:	simon c	Date:	Dec 15, 2003 2:17pm
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

Looks like some of the Gutenberg audiobooks (from audiobooksforfree.com) are deliberately 'crippled' to be lower bandwidth because the higher bandwidth versions are still sold. Still better than nothing, though.

However, the other person who does Gutenberg audiobooks seems to be a guy called Mike Eschman, and his recordings have a higher bitrate:

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/author?name=Eschman%2C%20Mike

It'd be cool to see a separate 'Gutenberg Audio' collection with all of these in one place, perhaps even labeled by bitrate.

s!

ps - the above information supplied by about 10 minutes of Googling, if you know better, don't hesitate to correct me!

This post was modified by simon c on 2003-12-15 22:17:05

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Poster:	Roland Wolf	Date:	Dec 15, 2003 5:01pm
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

I checked a couple of Audio-Books from Mike Eschmann. They were all the result of pushing text through a text-to-speech filter. This way the complete Gutenberg library can be converted as a batch job. Mike Eschmanns contribution is certainly valuable in some situations. Only a recording of a good speaker however provides true listening pleasure. Therefore the catalog entry should specify the conversion method.

My intention was to republish a Gutenberg audio-book as a part of a multimedia-product. Paying the requested 20% of the gross profit is not a problem, however the audio quality must meet consumers expectation.
Regards
Roland Wolf

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Poster:	simon c	Date:	Dec 15, 2003 11:46pm
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

Aw, I didn't know the Mike Eschman stuff is text to speech :( Thanks for picking that up.

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Poster:	visa798	Date:	Jan 5, 2004 11:18am
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

Has anyone tried to run the text through a text to speech reader that uses the AT&T Natural Voices engine (such as TextAloud MP3)?

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Poster:	Robot Books	Date:	Aug 3, 2004 1:14am
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

I've been using the Festival Speech Synthesis System for a number of projects. I have to say, it sounds a whole lot better than the audio produced for Gutenberg, mentioned in previous posts on this thread.

Hopefully, today will be my first post on archive.org, and people can judge for themselves.
The posting is not a classic text, but falls more into the current events category. However, perhaps my next project will be to offer a couple of books to Project Gutenberg. I've already synthesized a couple of Mark Twain books, and War and Peace.

I've actually gotten to the point I kinda like the Robot voice. However, I recognize that many people are put off by it. I think people should give synthesized speech more consideration. Once you get used to it, a whole new word of mobile listening is available.

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Poster:	nibs007	Date:	Feb 19, 2010 4:28am
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

http://www.simplylisten.com has over 50 audio books to download for free

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Poster:	Branko Collin	Date:	Aug 11, 2004 9:39am
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

A bunch of people helped read Lessig's Free Culture. I know Raph Levien was one of them, and he also has a couple of other audio books on his homepage at http://raph.levien.com/audiobook/ .

Dissatisfied with the quality of PG's text2speech, I tried to measure the interest of the subscribers to PG's volunteer mailing list for producing human read audio books. Although some people thought it might be a good idea, I don't think anybody ever did anything with that.

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Poster:	audiobookman	Date:	Mar 19, 2006 8:29am
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

Hi all, I have been reading a lot of the comments made in this forum and find them most fascinating. I am teacher whom teaches both disabled and normal able children. I find the use of audio books a good teaching aid, whilst being a good resource.

I know of a gentleman who supplies me with audio books. For more details contact Jeff at . audiobookservice@hotmail.co.uk

Many Thanks Joan

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Poster:	Freebryan	Date:	Oct 27, 2006 12:12pm
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

Hi Guys,

A whole bunch of sites out there have decent free audio books.

2 I would like to mention are http://www.audiobooks.net and http://www.literalsystems.org.

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Poster:	nibs007	Date:	Feb 19, 2010 4:20am
Forum:	gutenberg	Subject:	Re: Audio-Books at Gutenberg

There are some good websites that offer free audio books i came across http://www.simplylisten.com they have a link for free books which only lists a few but i stumbled across the advanced search and selected free from the price drop down menu and that listed over 50 audio books for free