Help Ted Striphas Make an OA Audiobook of The Late Age of Print

Help Ted Striphas make an open access audiobook version of The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control.

My IUB colleague Ted Striphas published The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control in 2009 with Columbia University Press. Coincident with the release of the copyrighted physical volume last year, Columbia released a free, CC-licensed PDF of the book. The goal of Ted’s next effort is to produce a text-to-speech (T-T-S) version of the book, which will be released freely online under a Creative Commons 3.0 BY-NC-SA license.  Kudos to Columbia University Press for supporting these progressive projects, including the new audiobook making effort.

Describing his project and seeking community help on it, Ted writes:

“Producing a T-T-S version of the book will require a great deal of textual cleanup — more than I can muster given my professional commitments, plus a newborn in my life.  Consequently, I’ve set up a wiki site — http//www.thelateageofprint.org/wiki — in the hopes that I might be able to crowdsource some help.”

“Why do I want to create a Late Age of Print audiobook?  First, I’m trying to promote both the idea and practice of free, open-source scholarly work — an issue that I address at length in an essay just out in the journal Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, on the politics of academic journal publishing.  Second, it seems profoundly unfair to me that people with vision impairments cannot access many scholarly titles, since few ever get transformed into audiobooks.  I’m hoping that my wiki might become a model for similar projects.  Admittedly, the project will serve to promote the book as well.”

If you are interested in helping on this worthy project and, along the way, demonstrating your support for open access scholarly publishing, everything you need to know should be findable on the website for The Late Age of Print.

(PS:  I cannot get the block quote function to work for me today, hence the old fashioned formatting.)