The Writing Show (WS): Welcome to the Writing Show, where writing is always the story. I’m your host, Paula B., here today with my guest, Hugh McGuire. Hugh McGuire is the creator of Librivox, a volunteer project for making and podcasting audio recordings of books in the public domain. He is a Montreal-based writer currently finishing a novel, and a former engineer. Welcome, Hugh. Thanks so much for visiting with us today.

Hugh McGuire (HM): Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

WS: Tell us about Librivox. What is it, and how does it work?

HM: The idea behind the project is to take books which are in the public domain, specifically texts which are already available on the Internet through the Gutenberg Project–classics of English-language mostly–and ask volunteers to record voice versions. We record an audio version of these books a chapter at a time, and in that way hopefully create a library of audio recordings which are freely available to anyone who cares to hear them. We’ve chosen one book to start, and the project is just getting under way. However, we’re hoping to see a snowball effect with volunteers who are interested in joining on and recording a chapter. We let people listen to them as the project continues.

WS: We’ll get into mechanics of that a little bit later, and we’ll also discuss how you can volunteer to read and how you can listen. But first, I’d like to talk about Librivox a little more. First of all, you mentioned that you’ve chosen a book. Which book is that?

HM: The first book is The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad.

WS: And how did you come up with that for your first choice?

HM: Well, I guess the whole project came about a little bit as something that just happened to interest me. On a recent long-distance drive I was looking for an audio version of The Secret Agent, and I found that I couldn’t find one that was freely available on the Internet. I thought, “Maybe that will be the start.” So that’s how I chose it. It’s a book that I thought perhaps had some relevance to today’s world, which I think it does. But in fact, I haven’t read the book yet; I’ve read Chapter 1 for the project, and listened to Chapter 2 from the project, but I eagerly await the following chapters as they come along.

WS: And one of them will be by me. I think it’s Chapter 13.

HM: Absolutely.

WS: I was wondering how you chose audio, and I think you’ve partially answered that question, but I wonder if you had any other thoughts on that.

HM: I guess it’s partly because it’s a technology that’s available right now, but it’s also something that I’ve always enjoyed at various times in my life. With podcasting, I think there’s an availability of content we haven’t seen before. CDs and radio are limited and constrained, but with podcasting, you can have any sort of content you like or that anyone’s interested in putting together. I’ve done many long-distance drives in my life and actually spent one summer with a very boring office job that I got through by listening to library books on tape. So I think my idea was just to make these books available in a format which is easily consumable by anyone who’s interested. The nice thing about podcasting on the Internet and with these new means of distribution is that the cost is just the volunteer time.

WS: How are you going to choose the next book, and all of the other books?

HM: Well, I think we’ll have to see how the project progresses. Right now, it’s in very early stages, so I’m hoping, as I said, to see a sort of snowball effect, particularly podcasters. I guess my ideal situation is for podcasters who exist out there in the ether to join in the project and record chapters, probably for the next book I select. But if it becomes a bigger project, I think if people have suggestions, I’ll be happy to entertain them. Ideally, as the project moves forward, it should get big enough that it sort of runs on its own to a certain degree.

WS: You mentioned podcasting. If a podcaster wants to get involved, or if anyone wants to get involved, what should they do?

HM: We have an email address. We also have a Weblog, which is where the podcast is distributed. The email address is librivox@yahoo.ca and the Weblog is librivox.blogsome.com. We got full subscription within a day for the first 13 chapters of The Secret Agent, and I have a number of people who have volunteered for chapters of the next book. But all it takes is an email. We have no standards at the moment. We’re taking anyone who wishes to record something.

WS: You said you have no standards, but people who want to record something for you obviously have to do certain things to make sure that the recording is intelligible and pleasant-sounding and hasn’t got a lot of background noise. Do you have any tips for them?

HM: Well, actually, if you listen to the parts that I’ve podcast so far, you’ll notice a fair amount of static on mine, and I probably don’t have the best talking voice. But I have looked around a little bit, and I think the bits of advice about talking slowly and enunciating, making sure you’re not too close or too far from your microphone, are sound. Right now I’m just using the internal microphone on my laptop, which isn’t providing great quality, so I’m looking to upgrade on that. But I’m learning as the project goes forward myself.

WS: You mention Our Media on your Web site as the place where these podcasts are going to be posted. Is that the ultimate repository for them, or is there going to be another place? How’s that going to work?

HM: I guess part of why I’ve been interested in this particular project is the free software movement, the open source movement, the Creative Commons and free culture movement, Wikipedia. There are all sorts of both technical and cultural things that have been happening around the Internet, which is about making both information and tools freely available to the public. Our Media was set up specifically to host public domain and Creative Commons-licensed media files, so I thought that was a very good place to put these. Those files in fact are hosted on the Internet archive, which is a giant archive of all sorts of public domain information. Ideally, I would like the Gutenberg Project–and I’m not sure whether they’ll be interested because of the varying quality of the project, with volunteers taking different chapters–but ideally I’d like to donate any files that come out of the project to the Gutenberg Project as well. So in fact, they’ll be openly available to anyone who wishes to take them, with no restrictions at all. And that’s something very important to this project. I didn’t want to have any licenses, or any royalties, or any fees, or anything. It’s completely free, completely public domain for whatever use anyone wishes.

WS: And the Gutenberg Project, of course, is the public-domain text-based repository of books.

HM: Yes. I’m not sure what their status is right now, how far they are along in their intended objectives, but it’s a huge database of public-domain texts which are available in e-text format, a very basic text format. I guess perhaps some of your listeners aren’t aware of how copyright laws work. I’m certainly no expert, but the copyright on a book expires after a certain amount of time, at which time it enters into the public domain, so anyone may use the text for any purpose they wish. So while I’d like to add, for instance, some more modern novels, those are subject to copyright restrictions, and if you’ve ever tried to buy an audio version of a book, you know that they’re fairly expensive. I just saw that the recent Harry Potter is selling for I believe 105 U.S. dollars.

WS: Oh!

HM: — for audio versions. So we’re hoping to provide texts which are already available to the public at no cost and to provide an audio version of those, or at least a small selection of them. I think it’s unlikely that we’ll ever cover the whole base of public-domain books, but we’ll do what we can.

WS: You bring up a very interesting point here when you talk about more modern books. There really isn’t any reason for authors not to make their books available in audio format for free if they want to. If I came to you and said, “I’d like to read my book aloud,” would you accept it?

HM: Yes, I think we would. Right now, the focus is on the sequential dissemination of chapters of the books that we’ll select in a little while, but I think there’s no reason why we wouldn’t certainly at least link to any authors who wished to do that. I think often the problem is that the publishing houses who own the copyrights, or at least maintain a certain amount of the rights, which is why many audio books are so expensive. I think our focus is going to be more on classics for the moment, but I’m very much in favor of any sort of free submission. I think you may know I’m just finishing a novel right now, and I’ve been thinking about this idea as a marketing possibility. Perhaps giving a free podcast version is perhaps a good marketing idea to help sell books. I don’t know whether it should also be in text or not, but it seems to me that this idea about giving some things for free often has a benefit further down the line. So I think that that may be somewhere that authors go.

WS: I think that’s a wonderful idea. In fact in a minute, I’m going to ask you to read a little bit from that book, and then our listeners can judge for themselves. And I happen to know that it is a wonderful first chapter. That’s all I’ve read, because that’s all that was available, but I loved it. But we’ll get to that in a minute. I wanted to ask you a couple of other things about this intellectual property issue. First of all, you mentioned Creative Commons, and I’m not sure everyone’s familiar with that. Can you just explain what that is?

HM: Certainly. Again, I’m not an expert on this, but it’s something I’m fairly interested in. Creative Commons is a movement to develop licenses that allow artists such as yourself, for instance, or me–anyone who’s providing media, whether it be a blog or a photograph or a podcast or a video–to say that instead of having the restrictive copyrights, like Hollywood movies have, or photos in the National Geographic, I want to say this art is free to the world who wants to use it. There would perhaps be certain restrictions, like it can’t be used for commercial purposes, but anyone who wishes to share or copy or use this art in any way is welcome to do so. So it’s really a movement which has come up in opposition to the restrictive copyright laws and approach of Hollywood and recording artists. Not so much the artists. but the music recording companies. The point is to give an alternate space for art that is open to the public. Not necessarily completely free, because you could, for instance, sell a book and make the e-text version or the Internet version of that text available. But I think it’s an important movement because, in my view, the restrictions of the copyrights and the desires of those who control copyright law in general right now are attempts to restrict the artistic and creative space of the world. So I think the Livrivox project is an answer to that a little bit, to help provide more content which is free.

WS: I’d like to explore this a little more. Intellectual property and copyright are huge subjects that fill volumes, but I just wanted to ask for your opinion on the open source movement and the public domain–I wouldn’t say it’s exactly a movement–but the idea that some creations get released into the public domain a lot earlier than they used to. Is there a line that divides what should be restricted and what should be made available freely? The reason I’m asking is monetary compensation. The idea is that a lot of open source potentially puts people out of work or restricts their income because their work is released for no pay, no charge. I’m just wondering how far that should go and where it’s counter-productive for the artist or the other creator involved.

HM: I think that it’s a very complicated issue, and there are many different aspects of the question. I think if you look at software, for instance, it’s quite a different issue than art. One of my heroes is Richard Stallman, who’s the founder of the free software foundation and a proponent of free software, which is different than open source. Open source is really a method of production, whereas free software talks about the freedoms associated with that software. But if you look at that model on the software side, you’ll see that in fact, it’s a very productive way of producing software. If you look at hiring people to develop software, rather than attaching licenses to software which you charge exorbitant fees for, there’s a model for that which works very well, and in fact may be more innovative than the restrictive way most software is developed now. I think in artistic matters it’s a little bit different, but if you were to ask the majority of fiction writers or the majority of musicians who produce albums, I think you would have a hard time finding too many who can make a living doing that. So I’m not sure that the model as it exists right now is particularly conducive financially to art. I don’t know what sort of model may develop out of this in the future, but I think one can imagine ways of doing things which are different than how they’re done right now, allowing more freedom to the art itself. So making it more freely available – or more cheaply available – and still allowing the artists themselves perhaps more control, might give them a more financially viable way of living. Again, if you ask most people who release a CD or a novel, there’s not a whole lot of money flowing in. And I think the way we have things set up, where you have record companies or publishing houses, their interest isn’t necessarily the writers’ and musicians’ and artists’ in general. So I think we’re probably at a turning point in the world right now, and it will be interesting to see how things progress.

WS: I would love for you to read a little bit from your forthcoming book, and to show everybody how the audio production is done.

HM: Again, I’m certainly no expert, but I’ll read just a very short little passage here. The novel is called Blind Spot, and it’s still in progress, but this is just a little section from Chapter 1.

In grade 7 or 8, my class went on a field trip to a police station. A burly, good-natured cop showed us around proudly. The 4’ 6” cells, with cream-colored cinderblock walls and yellow bars, just like in the movies, the racks of rifles, the police changing room adorned with topless pinups and dirty coffee mugs, the interrogation room with the one-way mirror, cracked down the middle and patched with duct tape.

The cop had a surprisingly high voice for such a big man, the square head shaved on the sides and in the back, and his massive hands looked like two damp sea creatures hauled ashore. He let us hold his revolver (bullets removed, of course), and I remember being astounded by its weight, its menace, the power I felt transferred to my sweating, nervous palm through that hunk of metal. The thing almost vibrated with the threat of death, and when I held it, I felt that vibration through my whole body. For a brief moment, I was one with that revolver. The boys around me squinted their eyes like covetous rodents as they hugged the gun. When I passed it to the next boy, I felt exhausted for a moment, and then lightened, as if I had been holding up a heavy block of stone, the tombstone, and had blindly been relieved of the duty. I felt weaker, too, less somehow, and I could see as each boy touched the gun the almost physical growth in their stature, the new maturity and gravity that seemed to descend on each of their faces.

The power to bestow death is intoxicating, and the thought of causing death fascinating, if only for the audacity, the impossibility, for most of us, of the idea. I wonder if anyone else imagined pointing that gun, loaded, at our teacher, Monsieur Glasson, a mean-tempered uncharitable man who smelled of cabbage and sweat and was afflicted by regular bouts of facial psoriasis that rendered his punishments increasingly draconian, and just pulling the trigger.

But if I imagined it then, I knew a line was there, bold and clear. I did not take that thought seriously. Most people don’t, except for psychopaths, fanatics, and soldiers whose wise trainers do everything they can to remove the inconvenient mental block of remorse and empathy.

But even for the rest of us for whom murder is abhorrent, awful images of violence sometimes flash through the mind. Maybe we are curious about the limits of the acceptable, that is all, curious about the limits of knowledge, in a way. There are two major markers for us all: birth and death. Maybe it is only to be expected that the human mind spend great amounts of time imagining murder and sex, violence and copulation.

It wasn’t so much terror of cars that had kept me from driving all those years; it was terror of myself, distrust of what I could do. Having control of an automobile, the murder weapon of choice in my gene pool, had always terrified me.

WS: I think that’s wonderful, and it’s clear to me that you are a master of observation and of description.

HM: Thank you.

WS: I can’t wait to read more of that, or hear more of it, whichever comes first.

Hugh, is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you would like to discuss?

HM: I guess I would just send out a call to all your listeners to hopefully take a listen to the chapters we’ve done so far and volunteer for the next one. I think that regarding audio books in general, there’s a really great unexploited sort of–I don’t know if market’s the right word–but unexploited creative space there, and I know I certainly enjoy listening to them. So I hope that podcasting maybe gives the means for that format of literature to explode in the ears of listeners all over the world.

WS: I think it will. And I can’t wait for it to happen. Can you just give your Web address again?

HM: Sure. All the information about the project, Librivox, can be found at librivox.blogsome.com.

WS: Hugh, I wish you much success with the project, and with your novel, and let me know when it’s ready for a peek. Thank you so much for being with us today.

HM: Thank you very much, and I look forward to your capture of The Secret Agent.

WS: You will have it soon. And be sure to visit our Web site at www.writingshow.com for more information and inspiration for writers. I’m Paula B., and you’ve been listening to The Writing Show.