2/28/09

One Million

A million is a largish number - especially if it relates to individual decisions by a population.

They give gold records in the music biz to commemorate a million sales. After all, the revenue generated is substantial. There are no gold anythings in the free publishing biz. That's OK - "free" is not "worthless." When a million decisions have been made to visit the literature of the past, that's a lot of hours invested in hearing the thoughts of great writers.

I've been proud to be a LibriVox reader (for three years, this month, in fact). And I'm prouder for having brought to the homes and cars of many people a total of one million listens to my solo readings, a goal I hit today.

If you've been a listener - thank you! And I hoped I've entertained you. Stay tuned. there's more choice from the old masters coming!

2/23/09

Coming Now to an iPhone Near You!

It's been strangely gratifying to see LibriVox recordings I've made for sale on EBay (What? Hadn't you noticed that yet?) "Strangely" because all LibriVox audiobooks are free for download from www.archive.org. But if people want to burn those downloads onto CDs and offer them for sale, that is actually an activity we LV'ers encourage, since not everyone has the patience for what can be long downloads.

Add to EBay a new outlet: http://www.travelingclassics.com/
Traveling Classics is a new application for your iPhone or iPod Touch which reads a classic book to you while scrolling the text on the screen, synchronized to the narration. As an application available at the iTunes AppStore, Traveling Classics has to submit all its intended content to Apple for permission.

On its opening day, February 12, Traveling Classics launched with eight audiobooks, one of which was my "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." So now, for a limited time only, you can have me read to you for over seven hours for 99 cents!
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=304223424&mt=8

Cool, huh? Not quite free... but the feeling that gives me: priceless!