In order to help Tee and his daughter through this diffcult period, Pip Ballantine has set up a fund where anyone who wishes to can chip in. Please consider doing so, if you have the means.

To Tee: We’re here for you, pal. You need anything at all, you let us know.

1. In the words of Evo Terra: “Tee was the first author to make his book into a serialized audiobook delivered by a podcast. And though others soon followed independent of Tee’s actions, his ‘Hey Evo, I have an idea…’ phone call in late 2004 was the genesis of what would become Podiobooks.com.”

First…I’m taking a hiatus from development on Podiobooks.com.

The reason is simple: I lack the time to do the PB 2.0 project justice. It kills me to admit that. When we started PB five years ago, I had two small kids, a simple 40 hour a week job, and my wife was not working. Now, I have a 12, 9, and 4 year old with all the commitments that follow from that, plus my wife is working full time, playing in two bands, teaching violin and fiddle, and I am working full time and filling in as Mr. Mom. It has become impossible to find the time to truly lead the project. Those things, combined with some recent health developments, have put the whammy on many of my personal projects. The PB2 project will go on (we are looking for new leads right now), and Evo and the PB2 team will continue driving it. It will grow and flourish, and I cannot wait to see where it goes next.

Second…Michelle and I will be recording the final Shadowdance podcast tonight. The reasons there are similar: my personal schedule and Michelle’s schedule no longer match up quite as well. She’s writing books, appearing on television and traveling, and I have my family and my career to look after. Also, my opinions on the subject matter of the show have changed, and I feel disingenuous continuing to give advice on a subject that I do not fully embrace. More on this in a future post.

For the record, The Secret Lair is still going strong: Kris and I will continue with our fun until the men in white coats come after us to take us away.¹ In fact, we just released Episode 29, chock full of goodness from the likes of Dr. John Cmar, Natalie Metzger, Jay Lynn, and our special guest, Mick Bradley.

So, that’s the news. How’s your day?

1. If they can get past the giant squid and the rabid zombie poodles.

We just hit 7000 episodes on Podiobooks.com.  If we assume the average episode length is 30 minutes, that would mean that we now have 3500 hours of audiobook goodness for the world to experience.

What are you waiting for? Go listen to something!

So far, everyone is moving things along pretty well.

• Thomas is making mad progress on the database migration.
• Tim is working on the new RSS engine, and has a version posted to the repository
• Jason is delving into developing tools to help authors tag their episodes and upload through the PB site, instead of the current song and dance, which is more complex than we’d like it to be.
• Evo is coming up with more ideas. Because that’s what Evo does.
• I’m working on the wireframes and working on getting sample data in for the developers. I’ve commented up the new schema and documented the old schema in the dev wiki.

The next meeting will be Monday night, 9pm EST.  As usual, notes will be published on the wiki.

• We now have a bit more organization thanks to the creation of a new development wiki.
• Thomas “cmdln” Gideon has stepped in and offered to take on the take of migrating the database. Read more on his thoughts here.
• Chris Snelgrove has offered to take on the project management, and bitchslap me when needed to keep the project rolling.

Our next meeting will be Monday, 8/3 at 9pm EST. To keep up with the latest, check out the meetings archive.

1. I am also jealous of his Wikipedia page.  Don’t you judge me.

About Bibliotech: The Evolution of Digital Publishing: Authors are podcasting MP3 novels. Publishers are inserting real-time ads into ebooks. And readers are discovering and communicating directly with authors on Twitter, Goodreads and other sites. Host Mark Jeffrey (@markjeffrey) interviews authors, technologists and publishing professionals about how digital media is changing their world.

Check out the first episode below, and visit bibliotechshow.com for future episodes.

It seems a ripe time for novel podcasting to grow. Traditional book publishers are struggling. Book sales are down; MacMillan has laid off employees, as have Random House and Simon & Schuster; and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has suspended the purchase of most new manuscripts. With advance money drying up as well as contracts, Terra says that aspiring writers now feel that “maybe I should try something on my own” and build an audience online.

Read the full article at Time.com

Why go Open Source?

As the years have rolled by we’ve seen that opening things to a community is a better way to build quality. We’re amazed and humbled by the contributions of both our authors and our members.  We would not be as strong as we are now without them.

If community passion and commitment has carried us this far, why not  be more transparent and get everyone involved on the next iteration of the web site?  There are talented people out there, from copy editors to codemonkeys to folks who excel at finding our bugs. Keeping the codebase a closed system is a dead end. Opening it up is the only way to go.

On a personal note, I have always been supportive of open source software, even though I’ve not been able to contribute to a serious project. This is also my way of giving something back to the community of developers, from whom I have learned so much of the years. I’m hoping that, in years to come, people will learn from our code the same way I have learned from the people who came before me.

How do I learn more, or contribute?

You can follow the progress of the project in two ways:

• A project log is available on our Ohloh project page: https://www.ohloh.net/p/podiobooks
• The source itself is hosted at Github: http://github.com/ctmiller/podiobooks/tree/master

If you have an interest in contributing to the project, please contact chris at podiobooks dot com.

Current Project Details: