Iambik Audio Launches New Audiobook Company and Community
Well known entrepreneur and thinker Hugh McGuire is launching his new project today, Iambik. Largely based on his experience with Librivox, “the most interesting cultural collaborative project this side of Wikipedia”, the new company will match book publishers with talented narrators to offer audio versions of contemporary books.
Iambik aims to change the way commercial audiobooks are made. For audiobook listeners, Iambik will offer hand-picked collections of audiobooks, a little off the beaten path, at reasonable prices (between $5 and $10) with no digital rights management—meaning they can be played on any computer or mobile device.
For publishers and authors, Iambik approaches everything as a partnership, by promoting print and ebooks, as well as selling audiobooks, and by giving healthy royalties on all sales.
Importantly, Iambik will not become an audio producer employing it’s own voice talent but rather aim to find the right match for each book, acting as a matchmaker and also working with narrators to help them get the opportunity to record the books they wish to record.
Hugh is already very active in many aspects of books. Besides Librivox having previously launched Book Oven, Bite-Size Edits, Earideas and BookCampToronto. You can read more about the well rounded team and advisors on the site.
They are launching today with 11 books, you can read the full press release here.
[Update 1h10pm]
We did a quick Q&A with Hugh this morning, going into a bit more details about this new company.
NextMontréal: Iambik seems to be largely based on your experience with Librivox, how did you come to this model, did it evolve from needs expressed by participants in Librivox or by publishers? Or did you see an opportunity to bring them together?
Hugh: I think it was just one of those moments where I said: wait a second: we’ve got talented audiobook narrators at LibriVox; there are publishers who would like to have more audiobooks made – maybe it’s time to put these two together. It’s something I thought about from the early days of LibriVox, but it finally felt like it was time.
So there were no particular requests from either publishers or narrators, but rather I guess that I knew both groups pretty intimately… and it seemed time to try to connect them.
NextMontréal: You must have already approached a number of narrators from Librivox, at the very least to record the first batch of books, how has this new model been received?
Hugh: Yes, the first batch of narrators were all people I had worked with at LibriVox … but going forward of course we’ll be open to anyone who can produce good audio in an independent set-up.
NextMontréal: What kind of relationship are you planning between Librivox and Iambik? Can a narrator start seeing Librivox not only as a creative project to participate in but also as a kind of proving ground to be picked up for professional work?
Hugh: They are very much separate projects, and actually that was a big concern in the LibriVox community: would this taint LibriVox? Would it poach all the “good” narrators? Would it overtake the forums? And the answer is, we’ll work to make sure none of that happens.
On the other hand, we’ll work to promote LibriVox from Iambik – there are some truly great audiobooks in LibriVox, and we’d like to help promote those to a new audience.
NextMontréal: What kind of platform are you using?
Hugh: We built our site on Django – and the key to it, I think the key to all publishing – is having a powerful database as your backend. We toyed around with repurposing the LibriVox platform – which is a hack of WordPress and custom php catalogue/management software, but we decided it would be easier to build from scratch, since there are many differences between the two projects.
NextMontréal: Do (or will) you have online tools for narrators and publishers to collaborate or will you mostly be working “in person”, as a new kind of agent between the participants?
Hugh: Well, as with LibriVox, we want to make sure we build tools that meet actual needs, rather than inventing ideas of how to solve problems that might not exist. So, we’re using a lot of existing software to manage our projects: we use Vanilla Forums to manage production, Dropbox to ship files around, email, google docs. The narrators themselves have their own audio recording and editing set-ups… so …
The pain points are more around audio file conversions, and getting audio files to the right places, so we’ll work on automating the most painful of those processes.
NextMontréal: You are launching with 11 books, do you have an idea (or hopes) of how many you might be releasing in the coming months?
Hugh: We’ll have another collection of about 11 books out in early new year. Ideally we’d like to produce about 10 books a month for six months, and then build up from there. My target, in two years, is to be producing on the scale of LibriVox, which is about 100 books/month.
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