Community-produced audio recording of Laurence Lessig’s New Book

by Steven Garrity in

Free Culture by Laurence LessigHaving enjoyed Laurence Lessig’s previous book, The Future of Ideas, I was looking forward to his latest book, Free Culture. The text of the book is available for free online. While I have read long works from my laptop LCD, this 352-page PDF file didn’t seem very appealing on screen.

I thought it would be nice to have an audio-book format. I even considered recording it myself – which would be acceptable considering the Creative Commons license on the book. However, I didn’t have the time, energy, or more importantly, the talent to do a good job at recording this.

With this in the back of my mind, I came across a post by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing about a weblogger-produced collaborative audio-book recording of the new Lessig book.

Now, only a few minutes after wondering if I should produce this myself, I’m listening to Chapter 1. Cool.

 

3 thoughts on “Community-produced audio recording of Laurence Lessig’s New Book”

  1. I do think that the web causes a sort of group-think phenomenon… something like pooled thinking.

    It’s like all those stories of the genius inventions throughout time that happened in two places at the same time and by sheer luck, only one of the inventors ended up being credited with having the “original idea.”

    Steven, I had the exact same response you did upon finding Lessig’s new book… the idea even came to me that I should take on such a project myself, but you took it to the next step and found someone else already engaged in the process. Fantastic.

    So, the question that remains seems to me on par with the Matrix’s flower vase scene: Was the idea to record an audio version of Lessig’s book patently obvious and so would have been thought of anyway by a bunch of folks or did we collectively sense the need for it within the web community and come to the idea by shared intuition?

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