David Wilk invited me to his Publishing Talks Podcast, to about LibriVox, iambik, libraries, PressBooks, and general future of publishing stuff.
Here is the link.
And here is the audio [mp3].
News
Lovely May
May has arrived, and this time we present 10 gems on and about love from the depths of our catalog.
Let’s start at the beginning with First Love, of which most of us have fond memories. In Ivan Turgenev’s novella, Vladimir Petrovich recounts his turbulent first romance…
If you don’t want troubles to happen in your relationship, you should take advice from Theodore Arnold Haultain. His Hints for Lovers cover all aspects of romance: from courtship to the first kiss until marriage and children.
On mother’s day (in most countries the 2nd Sunday in May) children take great pains to please their mothers. To avoid having this end in disaster, we recommend When Mother Lets us Cook by Constance Johnson – for children of all ages…
Good food and love sickness are often blamed for gaining weight – and young widow Molly has lots of the latter. While she’s trying to melt away her pounds, 4 suitors are trying to melt her heart. Who is going to succeed in The Melting of Molly, a novel by Maria Thompson Daviess?
Raina Petkoff faces a similar problem in George Bernard Shaw’s drama Arms and the Man. There is her fiance, just returned from the war, but a refugee whom she granted shelter the winter before also stakes his claims. The choice is hers – who will it be?
It’s always a choice whether to love or to leave. Sometimes the choice is made for the good of the other. How such a decision may lead to great pain for the other person after all is something that the protagonist of Camille, Alexandre Dumas (fils) famous novel, has to find out.
George Bellow hopes that the girl who just dumped him will see the errors of her ways eventually. Until then, he takes a walking tour through the country side, where he unexpectedly finds a friend and true love. Curious? Read The Money Moon by Jeffery Farnol.
Money was the driving force behind Charlotte Turner Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems. After all, by writing them she could earn enough money to get her out of jail…
Like a jail can a relationship feel when the love is gone. A woman, tightly bound in another commitment, finds some freedom while stargazing with a young astronomer. Find out about the fate of the Two on a Tower in Thomas Hardy’s novel.
Unfortunately those two would not have been able to verify Einstein’s theory of relativity. This was done when the sun was shining, or rather, during its eclipse on May 29, 1919. Read Easy Lessons in Einstein by Edwin E. Slosson to find out all about relativity.
Enjoy – and give love a chance!
LibriVox API & OPDS
You may not know that LibriVox has a catalog API: that is, a way for other developers to access our whole catalog to build apps & other services on top of our audiobooks. You can find info about it here:
http://wiki.librivox.org/index.php/LibriVoxAPI
This has resulted in numerous audiobook apps for the iPhone, Android, as well as a few web services built on top of the LibriVox catalog – which is wonderful, because it gives more people access.
Now there is a “new” catalog spec being developed for ebooks, called OPDS, the Open Publishing Distribution System … which is designed to standardize how publishers let people know about their ebook collections, see:
http://opds-spec.org/
The tireless Chris Goringe has been working on implementing what will be, I think, the first audiobook catalog to the OPDS spec… Which means that we’ll standardize how other developers access out catalog.
Among other things, that should mean that our catalog can be put into places like the Open Library.
It’s kinda geeky, but kinda fun. More news to come …
April Fools!
Once more a new month has begun, and it’s no joke that once again we present 10 gems from our catalog.
Hopefully it’s not too late to prepare for April Fool’s Day! Our recording of Pathological Lying, Accusation and Swindling by William and Mary Healy tells you all there is to know about liars, so you will not be taken advantage of.
To avoid exactly that is the aim of rich Mr. Brewster, when his daughter appears with a brand new husband in the novel by P. G. Wodehouse. Will The Indiscretions of Archie be too much to bear for the unsuspecting father-in-law?
John Kendrick Bangs’ protagonist The Idiot proves to be quite trying company in Mrs. Smith-Pedagog’s boarding house. His table talk vexes all other guests, but is he really such a fool as everyone assumes?
Fools are certainly those who do not learn from history. The genocide on the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 is denied, condemned, or seen as part of normal warfare. Read about Martyred Armenia in Fa’iz El-Ghusein’s autobiographical account of a Turk condemned to spectator.
While we can vow “never again” faced with human atrocities, we can only prepare for the worst and hope for the best when it comes to natural disasters. On April 18, 1906, The San Francisco Calamity by Earthquake and Fire happened. Charles Morris interviewed eyewitnesses for a first hand account of the catastrophe.
The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen also profess to be first hand accounts of real events, but who has already heard of the baron will take the stories in Rudolf Erich Raspe’s book with a grain of salt.
The same should young Vivie do in George Bernard Shaw’s play, after she excerts a promise from her mother to end her questionable business. But Mrs. Warren’s Profession is a profitable one, and luxuries are hard to give up…
Instead of giving up, what if somebody could take over your life for a while? Unfortunately the stand-in for John Chilcote turns out to be the better him. Find out if the politician is getting his life back in The Masquerader by Katherine Thurston.
Undercover agents are used to slip into the skin of other people, hopefully to protect the innocent. But even as Gabriel Syme turns into The Man Who was Thursday, it is still difficult to find out who needs protection in the story by G. K. Chesterton.
This year April ends with a long holiday weekend. Celebrate Easter with a selection of poems From The Temple on various religious topics by the Anglican priest George Herbert.
Enjoy – and don’t get fooled!