Unquiet Desperation

On a recent episode of Podioracket, I made the comment that, if all you know about Evo Terra is from his podcast, you really have no idea who you are dealing with. Evo’s a smart guy and has a brilliant way of cutting to the core of an issue which, I must admit, I envy¹. Check out his recent presentation on Big Numbers for Ignite Phoenix. While the ideas he’s discussing are, at their core, simple math, it’s the perspective he brings to the topic that showcases his skill.

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

Mark Jeffrey, author The Pocket and the Pendant and The Two Travelers, is hosting an excellent new vidcast Bibliotech:

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.

This weekend, Evo set up a UStream chat with anyone interested in knowing more about Podiobooks.com, specificially dealing with what’s coming in version 2.0. Here is the archived video, for your enjoyment and eddification.

“Podcasting Your Novel: Publishing’s Next Wave?” is the title of the latest article featuring the luminaries of the Podiobooks universe. J.C. Hucthins, Scott Sigler, Mur Lafferty, and Evo Terra are all quoted in the discussion of how podcasting novels is slowly changing the publishing world.

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

I’m happy to announce that the next iteration of the Podiobooks.com codebase will be an open source project, released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. We’re redesigning the system from the ground up, taking lessons learned from the last four years and folding them into a fresh batch of binary goodness for all you folks to enjoy.

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: