A few ideas come to mind; a bulletin board / forum might be worthwhile, to discuss books and approaches and stuff like that; if the project continues to grow it might also provide a way that you can ‘open source’ the whole process: if people are willing to coordinate the volunteers for a book they can post a topic asking for volunteers, and all you need to do is set guidelines…

The other possibility is bittorrent feeds for the audio files. If demand grows (and I think it might) that would take the load off whatever servers you use.

Oh, and how about getting the librivox.org domain name?

Let me know what I can do… chris[at]goringe[dot]net

Don’t know if bittorrent is necessary. Isn’t the internet archive hosting the audio files? Those wonderful people will worry about the bandwidth charges. A link to their donation page would be polite, though. It is:
http://www.archive.org/donate/index.php

Re: bittorrent & archive … yes they are hosting, and an archive donation link is a great idea. I’ll make their meta largess more clear in the “about” texts, and add a donate button of some kind.

cheers.

1. On the main page, show only items in the Books & Podcasts categories
2. In the New and Volulunteers sidebar sections, display the linked title to the latest post in those sections.

Those two things will make the site more focussed on listeners (which there are moer of that readers, of course).

A forum is on the wish list, along with a polling system for voting on next books, and several other things. Don’t want to go overboard, though. It’s possible to run the show with Wordpress and some phpBB forums.

BB – yes, phpBB or similar was exactly what I had in mind.

Polling – I can see a couple of options here (and, btw, I’d be up for doing any required coding to make them work). One is simple voting, where the admins put up a list and take votes. The other, which would move more responsibility onto the community, would be to allow anyone to propose a book: they would divide it up into chunks, and call for volunteers to read. Anyone could then sign up for any book, and a book would be selected to be produced by virtue of being fully subscribed. This could be done relatively easily via a forum (just have a “readers” section with a new thread for each proposed book) or via some custom software (which, as I say, I would be prepared to write) if you want to automate it.

tis, like the idea of having the project as community-driven as possible … put onus on a “book booster” to get friends & neighbours to record chapters. we could award “stars of public domain excellence” for the most completed books in a month. say the top 5 subscribed books automatically get listed as to-do books on the main page, other books you need to search for a little.

also: for now, I think our real target is readers, rather than listeners, though I may be wrong, so lets be careful to keep the volunteer info visible. ie, I’m not sure if we should relegate volunteer info to the sidebar in this format yet…

also, kristen in the “books” sidebar section, we can just have the 5 latest completed books … and maybe the 5 books under construction.

I think that’s it for now … gotta get to bed!
later.