There's a reading going on...inside my iPod
A thought.
I've had podcasts on the brain lately. The last month or so has been something of a crash course in 'em -- a friend and I now run one, and it seems as though they're very easy and inexpensive to get onto the web. (Thank you, libsyn).
I was at a reading tonight that, I'd say, around forty to fifty people attended. (That's a good thing, in my book -- the room itself was packed.) And it's now very likely that I will purchase a book from at least one, if not both of the authors who read. So here's something that I wonder: given that nearly everything I've read recently observing the world of book publishing mentions that book sales are down, that culturally, we're less literary than we once were, etcetera etcetera, there's a part of me that wonders if podcasting couldn't be utilized here to some extent.
(I realize that my newfound enthusiasm for podcasting may be reminiscent of, um, the irrational exuberance that led to the late-90s tech boom....but hear me out.)
Recording live audio wouldn't, I'd imagine, be all that hard -- I assume a laptop with some basic audio-recording software could do a decent enough job recording the human voice. You set your laptop up, you record, you upload. The authors end up with something that's going to promote what they do to more than the fifty or one hundred people at the reading itself; the venue ends up with something that'll draw more people, in theory, to their site; the publisher, in theory, sells more -- seems relatively win-win. The only thing that I'd think might be problematic is copyright issues -- but given that WNYC, among others, has embraced podcasting, I don't know how much of an issue this would be.
Obviously, this isn't workable for everyone -- and authors who may not be the most charismatic readers might not fare too well. But I can't think that it wouldn't be fairly easy to get something like this off the ground, if it hasn't happened already.
I've had podcasts on the brain lately. The last month or so has been something of a crash course in 'em -- a friend and I now run one, and it seems as though they're very easy and inexpensive to get onto the web. (Thank you, libsyn).
I was at a reading tonight that, I'd say, around forty to fifty people attended. (That's a good thing, in my book -- the room itself was packed.) And it's now very likely that I will purchase a book from at least one, if not both of the authors who read. So here's something that I wonder: given that nearly everything I've read recently observing the world of book publishing mentions that book sales are down, that culturally, we're less literary than we once were, etcetera etcetera, there's a part of me that wonders if podcasting couldn't be utilized here to some extent.
(I realize that my newfound enthusiasm for podcasting may be reminiscent of, um, the irrational exuberance that led to the late-90s tech boom....but hear me out.)
Recording live audio wouldn't, I'd imagine, be all that hard -- I assume a laptop with some basic audio-recording software could do a decent enough job recording the human voice. You set your laptop up, you record, you upload. The authors end up with something that's going to promote what they do to more than the fifty or one hundred people at the reading itself; the venue ends up with something that'll draw more people, in theory, to their site; the publisher, in theory, sells more -- seems relatively win-win. The only thing that I'd think might be problematic is copyright issues -- but given that WNYC, among others, has embraced podcasting, I don't know how much of an issue this would be.
Obviously, this isn't workable for everyone -- and authors who may not be the most charismatic readers might not fare too well. But I can't think that it wouldn't be fairly easy to get something like this off the ground, if it hasn't happened already.
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