===================================================================
  DATE : 2021.01.13
  TIME : 17:22
AUTHOR : norris@sdf.org
 TITLE : UNDERGROUND AUDIOBOOK
 
===================================================================
Underground: Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic
Frontier is a book written by Suelette Dreyfus with research by
Julian Assange in 1997.  The book's title is an apt description
of what the book is about, so I won't go into detail about
that. One of the unusual things about Underground is that the
authors licensed the book as literary freeware, which means that
the book is available to anyone, anywhere at no cost, and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever, except for commercial use of
course. The book is available at Project Gutenburg as well as at
http://underground-book.net.  After reading Underground in 2007,
I tried to contact Suelette Dreyfus about making a festival text
to speech audio version available as a serialized podcast. I never
could get in touch with her, so I emailed Julian Assange about
this:

Tue, Mar 6, 2007, 8:41 PM 

"Julian, I have tried
many time times to contact both you and Suelette
regarding this. I would like very much to make the book
Underground available in festival generated audio in a
podcast format. I have taken the text files available at
http://www.xs4all.nl/~suelette/underground/underground-speech-text/
and have converted them to audio using festival. I would like
very much to make these files available as mp3 and ogg files
(converted from the verbatim text files) available for download on
an individual basis, as well as to allow the end user to subscribe
to an rss feed containing the audio files. My gut tells me that
this is something that I am allowed, but I do not want to assume
the wrong thing. I want to make sure that i have permission to do
this.  Please know that I seek no personal gain from this. I would
just be making the converted files available to people in modern
download-able format. The feed could even be available in iTtunes.
Please let me know if this is something I am allowed to do. Thanks
in advance for your kind consideration of this request."

His reply:

Tues, Mar 6, 2007, 10:04 PM 

"Dear dave. Please do!

Sorry if we haven't been easily available. Busy consulting for
this http://wikileaks.org/

Best, J"

I only included the above exchange for the following obvious
reasons: it was super cool to have talked to one of the authors;
Julian Assange wrote the super cool program surfraw (that I still
use today in a rofi menu); the historical reference to wikileaks
in it's infancy; and Julian Assange is even more (in)famous today.
So please allow my braggadocio, as it was my 15 minutes of fame.

I did make the audio files, and did release them as a podcast,
and made them available for download too.  I hosted these files on
my server from 2007 until 2011 or so, when I sort of took a hiatus
from the linux community.

Anyway, the book is awesome, and you should read it if you
haven't.  Yesterday I generated new festival audio files for the
book and put them on my gopher sites; download and enjoy if you
wish.


--norris

(o\_!_/o)