Free Culture Audio Book

I’ve been listening to Larry Lessig’sFree Culturewhile driving home from work each day. Larry does a better job than anyone else I’ve read at making the point that copyright as it currently stands and is currently enforced, is having a detrimental affect on our culture. He also proposes solutions that make sense both to content providers and it’s consumers. I highly recommend reading it. Larry should really get a white house appointment.

But what I’d like to talk about is the collaborativeaudio bookproject that has sprung forth from the permissive licensing that Lessig offered for his book. It’s a brilliant idea, and lessig himself was surprised by it. In the wonderfully typical fashion of the open source movement, someone called out for contributions to a project, and the community responded. This is great. In almost no time at all, the whole book was read and posted to the web.

What is not good about this project is the complete lack of quality control. Some readers are really not cut out for this kind of thing. They have terrible diction, timing and enunciation. On top of this, the files themselves are horribly mastered, of wildly varying loudness, so you’re constantly having to adjust the volume when moving from chapter to chapter. There is bad popping on many chapters and generally bad recording conditions in others. If I handed a copy of it to a friend and had him listen to it, with no qualification that this was a free book, that friend would likely not get all the way through it due to it’s poor production.

Now don’t get me wrong. I still think this is a great project. But it needs much more rigorous project management. Someone with audio mastering experience should sit down, balance the tracks, and try to clean things up. Some of the tracks should have been rejected and re-recorded. Just because you can sit down and read something for 45 minutes does not mean you should be a contributor to a project like this.

Often times community contributed projects, whether they are building open source software, or building a house, suffer from shoddy design, inplementation, and workmanship. Their contributors often include amateurs who are cutting their teeth working in areas in which they have no experience. This is okay. It’s fine learning how to put up sheetrock your first time while actually building a house, but you have to have someone who knows how to do it, and ideally is good at it, to supervise and ensure you’re doing a good job, and that the sheetrock is not going to fall from the ceiling in 6 months. The same applies in projects such as this one. Record a chapter, but in the process, learn which software is the best to use, read up about how to read-aloud, which syllables to properly intonate, what sounds good to the ear. Learn about audio mastering, how to make your tracks sound their best with limited bit rates.

I understand these things take time and energy. Making a good product always does. But I think that’s what we have to focus on here, not just something that is novel, but something that is both novel and a good product, and product that someone listening to it says "this is great", instead of "this is great but I’m constantly distracted from the text because of all it’s flaws in production.

Ultimately this is what will give validity to free as in beer products of this type. Quality. Polish. A lot of the free music and movies out there, produced my artists not backed by labels and studios are great. They are genuinely inventive and arguably more meaningful than most of the crap pumped out by labels and studios. But the production value of the work of these independent artists is usually so poor that it compromises the work to the point that it’s more painful to watch or listen to than pleasurable. Production value is immensely important.

So why isn’t it there? Perhaps because the proponents of free as in beer culture are often people not professionally involved in production value. A band that is willing to give away it’s songs for free usually is not involving a mastering engineer. They cost a lot of money and generally have skills that are pretty specific and have a lot of experience behind them. The band wants to sing and play guitar and rock out in the stage, they don’t want to sit behind a computer for hours getting the sound just right. They’re getting it just right enough to please themselves. And who can blame them? Many of these bands are made up of people who work normal day jobs and spend their free time writing songs and practicing their instruments. They don’t have the time or energy to learn something like mastering or studio production. I’m not saying here that no independent bands master their music, but as the archives of MP3.com suggest, many don’t. And that hurts their chances of getting listened to.

I know this analogy is stretching thin here, so I will make my point. Perhaps along with soliciting for readers of the chapters of free culture, they should also have solicited the services of a mastering engineer. Or at least someone who could have brought all of the tracks together into a cohesive whole. Also, they should have posted guide lines for what is acceptable for quality and what is not. Can’t speak without slurring? You can’t contribute.

I don’t mean to be a downer here, but ultimately, the value of an idea is often reduced to the value of the products of that idea. If free as in beer products are perceived to be poor quality, the value of the idea of free as in beer products is reduced. If the Average Joe can be shown that free products can be as high quality as paid for products, it legitimizes the idea of free products in a way that books and speeches and lawmaking can’t convey. If those products also carry more subjective value: funnier books and TV shows, better catchier music, then you are really cooking.

The reason Lessigs book will do well is based on both. Its subjective value is high, he’s a smart guy dealing with a big issue and he does it well. Its production value is also good. It’s well edited and well presented, the ideas flow clearly from one time and viewpoint to the next. Had his ideas been the same, but presented only in an illegible flowing scipt font at 9pt. It’s over all value would be much less because it’s inaccessible.

The same applies here. Don’t diminish the subjective value of the work with sloppy production values. If you’re going to invest the time and energy to make a product, make it the best product you can. The idea for it is very novel, and very cool. Ultimately Lessig’s noble experiment may be transformative. We owe it to the idea to execute it properly.

Posted by Joe Mullins at May 28, 2004 12:42 PM |TrackBack