On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 12:17:23PM -0400, David A. Desrosiers wrote:
On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Greg Newby<gbnewby@pglaf.org> wrote:
A more general approach would be to let visitors to www.gutenberg.org put their selected files (including those generated on-the-fly) on a bookshelf (i.e., shopping cart), then download in one big file, or several small ones.
If you're looking at it at that level, why not just offer some streaming audio of the books as well? You could do this very simply with any number of dozens of dynamic content streaming applications in whatever language you choose (Perl, PHP, Python, Java, etc.)
This is a good point. I don't know why we don't have streaming, especially since iBiblio does have streaming (I think). If you could suggest some software that seems likely to work on the iBiblio server (Apache, PHP, Perl all on Linux; free), especially that could just be dropped into bibrec.php that I sent earlier, that would be a tremendous help. The funny part is that I get inquiries all the time via help@ on "how do I save an audio file locally?" It seems the most common audio listening experience is to download & play back (perhaps with a delay for the download to complete), so people are doing the same thing as streaming (i.e., immediate listening), but needing to wait for the download to complete. It would be nice to offer streaming, instead. -- Greg
I actually used one to demo for a DJ/Amtrak train conductor several months back. He wanted a way to pull the tags/artists out of his enormous mp3 collection, and in 15 minutes on the train (with 'net), I found one that would let him "radio-enable" his entire mp3 collection, including a web interface to stream, play, download, view, sort, browse all of the artists by collection, tag, album art, date, etc. all in Perl.
It should be a simple matter to have something similar latched onto the Gutenberg audio collection, so anyone can click on the audiobook to either download, stream, convert, etc. the book in whatever format they prefer.
Just an idea...