The Late Age of Print Open Source Audiobook

Welcome to The Late Age of Print open source audiobook project. I'm glad that you stopped by!

Listening to Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price on a long car trip got me thinking: why not make an audiobook out of The Late Age of Print? And why not, like Anderson, give the digital recording away for free? The thought had barely crossed my mind when reality started to sink in. "You're no Chris Anderson," I told myself. "You don't have the time or the resources to make an audiobook out of Late Age. Just forget about it."

You're here, clearly, which means I didn't forget about it. I figured if I couldn't make an audiobook myself, then I'd do the next best thing: let the computer do it for me, using a text-to-speech synthesizer. The more I thought about the project, the more convinced I became that it was a good idea. It wouldn't just be cool to be able to listen to Late Age on an iPod; an audio edition would finally make the book accessible to vision impaired people, too. Indeed, it seemed deeply unfair to me that people with vision impairments could access many scholarly titles, since few ever got transformed into audiobooks.

And so I got down to work. I extracted all of the text from the free, Creative Commons-licensed PDF of Late Age and proceeded to text-to-speech-ify it a chapter at a time. I played back my first recording -- the Introduction -- but it was disaster! The raw text had all sorts of remnants from the original book layout. They seriously messed up the recording, and so I knew they needed to go. I began combing through the text, only to discover that the cleanup would take me, working alone, many more hours than I could spare, especially with a newborn baby in my life. Frustrated, I nearly abandoned the project for a second time.

Then it dawned on me: if I'm planning on giving away the audiobook for free, then why not get people who might be interested in hearing Late Age in on it, too? Thus was born this, The Late Age of Print open source audiobook project. The plan is for all of us to collectively create a Creative Commons-licensed text-to-speech version of the book, which will be available for free online.

There's a good deal of work for us to do, but don't be daunted! If you choose to donate a large chunk of your time to help out the cause, then that's just super. But don't forget that projects like this one also succeed when a large number of people invest tiny amounts of their time as well. Your five or ten minutes of editing, combined with the work of scores of other collaborators, will yield a top-notch product in the end.

I doubt that I have a large enough network of my own to pull off this project, so if your blog, Tweet, contribute to listservs, or otherwise maintain a presence online, please, please, please spread the word about it.

Please don't be shy about editing! That's what this project is all about. Here are some guidelines to get you started. And feel free to edit or add to these instructions if you find I've left anything out.

[edit] First Steps

So far I've created individual pages for each of The Late Age of Print's seven chapters. You can access them using the navigation pane at left or the portal located in the header above. Each page contain its respective chapter's raw (unedited) text. The only exception is the Introduction. I've given it a preliminary cleaning, so that you can begin to see the type of work that needs to be done.

For those of you unfamiliar with wiki editing, it's pretty simple. Just click the "EDIT" tab at the top of the page you want to work on and make the appropriate changes in the editing field. Be sure to click the "SAVE PAGE" button at the bottom when you're done. If you've made major changes, or if you want to let others know where in the editing you've left off, you may wish to briefly record that information in the summary box above the save button.

You don't need to be a registered user of The Late Age of Print wiki to make changes, but your computer's IP address will be associated with whatever anonymous edits you make.

[edit] Deletions

Much of the textual cleanup will involve the elimination of extraneous words, numbers, and punctuation marks. These include:

• footnote numbers (I've already deleted all of the actual notes)
• page header and page number remnants
• hyphens (and thus closing up hyphenated words)
• ellipses and brackets within quotations

There are also image captions that will need to be erased as well. The accompanying text may need to be modified somewhat in the absence of the images.

[edit] Additions

There's not a lot that needs to be added to the text, but the few additions that are needed will go a long way toward making a well-polished text-to-speech audiobook. Text-to-speech is a little quirky, especially when it comes to abbreviations. I'd recommend adding periods wherever you find an abbreviation, to ensure that the computer reads it properly. So, for example, you'd change ISBN to I.S.B.N., NEA to N.E.A., and so forth.

In most cases, direct quotations should be preceded by the word QUOTE. A comma, followed by the words END QUOTE, should conclude most direct quotations. Quotation marks are superfluous on the text-to-speech program I'm using and can therefore be deleted. Words and phrases in "scare quotes" don't need QUOTE/UNQUOTE accompanying them.

Section breaks in each of the chapters should be preceded by the word, SECTION. A colon and the section title should follow immediately thereafter.

[edit] Mods

Text-to-speech also has trouble saying certain things. My name, Striphas, sounds like "Strip-has" when the computer reads it, and so you'll see in the Introduction that I've rendered it phonetically. You may need to spell things out phonetically in other places, too, especially where proper names are concerned.

Other issues: the t-t-s program I'm using cannot differentiate between "read" in the present and "read" in the past tense. Accordingly, you'll need to change "read" (past tense) to "red." (This has been given a first pass.) I suspect we'll find other issues like this, too. If so, please add them to this part of the guidelines.

Phonetically challenging words: read, live

I've added Creative Commons license statements to the beginning of each of the chapters. Please don't delete or modify them.

[edit] Finishing Touches

Once you think a chapter's text is sufficiently clean, please make a note at the top of the page to that effect. I'll cut-and-paste the document and perform the audio recording myself, using Adobe Acrobat's read aloud function on my MacBook. Of course, if you have access to higher quality text-to-speech software than I do, by all means please go ahead and perform the reading/recording yourself. You can then send me an email to arrange a file transfer.

FYI, I'm not a fan of the text-to-speech software that's native to Macintosh systems, which is why I'm not using it. Although there are many voices to choose from, to me they sound more machine-like than the Adobe reader.

Once I have sufficiently good audio recordings of each of the chapters, I'll make them available here and on The Late Age of Print blog.

[edit] Next Steps