Telltale Weekly is releasing professionally recorded audiobooks in MP3 and ogg vorbis formats using bitpass micropayments system. They're doing everything right - paying artists, reusing the public domain, low-cost and not anti-customer digital right management systems. If they can't make a go of this, it's proof that the democratization of media, importance of fair use and customer trust and all the rest are just pipe dreams. I'm gonna make an audio cd of some stuff to listen to in traffic. How sweet would it be if they could get their hands on some of the old radio series from the 30s and 40s. I'd LOVE to listen to The Shadow in the car as audiobooks. Surely the rights to that stuff could be had at a reasonable price?

Telltale Weekly seeks to record, produce, and sell performances of at least 50 public domain texts a year, with the intention of releasing them under the Creative Commons Attribution License five years or a hundred thousand sales after their first appearance here, whichever comes first. Your purchases help us to build and/or contribute to a free audio equivalent of Project Gutenberg. Read More

Quality Recordings by Compensated Artists
To do each text justice, Telltale Weekly is committed to using professional-grade equipment and experienced actors, and pays for both (in addition to bandwidth and royalty fees) by charging as little as 25 cents per story, much of which goes to the artists. Read More

BitPass and Micropayments
The BitPass payment solution is based on the founding belief that the most important criterion is ease of use. Using Bitpass, Telltale Weekly can offer audiobooks for as little as twenty-five cents each in a system that makes purchasing as easy as surfing the web, with no software downloads or installations required. Read More

DRM-Free MP3 and Ogg Vorbis Audio
In additon to the popular MP3 format, all texts at Telltale Weekly are available in the Ogg Vorbis open, free audio compression standard (.ogg). Telltale Weekly will also voluntarily donate a portion of every Ogg Vorbis purchase to the Xiph.org Foundation (creators of the standard). And after paying for a recording, you can listen to it however and wherever you want for personal use, so every MP3 and Ogg Vorbis download is DRM free. Burn away. Read More