Wanna read me a story?

I have now had cervical radiculopathy for nearly a month. Basically my giant head is smashing the jelly donuts in my backbone. The jelly of one of the jelly doughnuts squished out in a way that makes my spinal cord sad. This leads to intense pain and severely disrupt my sleep. There's a whole thread about it in this forum if you're interested.

But this thread is about something else.

I have found that listening to audiobooks at night distracts me from a lot of the pain. So I start the audiobook when I am going to attempt to go to sleep. Since I know that I'm going to listen to the same book four or five times, then I'm not worried about missing anything.

Last night I fell asleep listening to one of my favorites: my side of the mountain. I did manage to sleep for 3 hours. When I woke up, I was in a lot of pain, but the story was lovely and I found my brain spending time with the story rather than the pain. I wasn't able to get back to sleep and I end up listening to the entire book.

Some books are available as an audiobook and some are not.

Last spring I started to reread ecotopia. I was very much enjoying it. I got about a third of the way through it, but got really busy with other things and ended up not finishing it, although I did read another page or two every once in awhile.

I cannot find it as an audiobook.

Not long ago I met somebody who wanted a project. They wanted to set up a residual income stream featuring their particular skills. So I put my fat head to work and came up with the idea that they could make an audiobook of Mike Oehler book: the $50 and up underground house book. I called Mike and ask him if it would be okay and he said yes.

And then that person never did it.

The author of ecotopia has died, so I don't know what would be involved in getting permission to make this into an audiobook.

...


For 26 days I have been on my back and in a lot of pain. Some days are worse than others. Sometimes I can answer emails for a couple of hours.

Apparently there is a high probability that my body will absorb the problematic jelly from the jelly donut. But it could take a long time. Maybe weeks. Maybe months.

Maybe somebody could read this book to me. Maybe just recorded on a cell phone, maybe something fancier.

Maybe the right people can be contacted and it could be put out as an official audiobook - thus a residual income stream.

I do think that this is a rather iconic book for permaculture folks.

I would be willing to trade DVDs cards and stuff to have this book in an audio format.

Maybe the audio format is already out there on the internet somewhere and I just can't seem to find it. It's not at audible - which is where all these are there books have been at. And Jocelyn looked at Amazon. Maybe the audio book is available in the public domain somewhere. ... Okay I just checked. There is something out at archive.org but it is not a reading of the book.

So... Anybody want to read me a story?

I'm willing. Not sure if the quality of my laptop's microphone will be satisfactory but I'll give it a go.

I will need a pdf of whatever you want read. If the first chapter turns out well enough that you want a book read to conclusion, we can talk about compensation [such as DVDs or whatever.]

http://www.amazon.com/Ecotopia-Audio-Novel-Ernest-Callenbach/dp/1559270527%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAJ3XCC7GLJWZDXC2A%26tag%3Dbook0dc0-20%26linkCode%3Dsp1%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D1559270527

cassette but....

Joseph Johnson wrote:http://www.amazon.com/Ecotopia-Audio-Novel-Ernest-Callenbach/dp/1559270527%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAJ3XCC7GLJWZDXC2A%26tag%3Dbook0dc0-20%26linkCode%3Dsp1%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D1559270527

cassette but....

So maybe we just need somebody to convert it from cassette to a big mp3 file. Anybody want to do that in exchange for some of my stuff?

Has Evan mentioned our friend Stephanie? She does voiceover and audiobook work. [If he says "Which Stephanie?" just say Dr. Murphy.]

I am not set up to read books out loud for you, but have had others in the past suggest I do books on tape or poetry, because they thought I had a good voice for that.

Here is a suggestion though, for a great series of 'meant for' audio, radio type, stories....not related to permaculture just good escape sci/fi fiction

This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Tower_of_Inverness is a series that captivated us for a long time.

ZBS entertainment produced this series and one called Stars and Stuff.
http://www.zbs.org/index_new.php/store/product/stars-and-stuff-cd

I think we still have ours on cassette somewhere......maybe they're still available on another format.

I'll read you a story next week if stories are still wanted. It would be basic reading to my laptop quality, but still, audible words.

Saw this posted on FB by Dr. Murphy.

https://www.vocalid.co/voicebank

The Human Voicebank is VocaliD's crowdsourced initiative to gather the world’s largest collection of standardized speech recordings from English speakers of all ages and backgrounds.