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AUDIOBOOK NARRATION
Thinking of voicing some texts in the public domain? You're not limited to books. Newspapers, magazines, and short stories are also in the public domain! In the US, newspapers, magazines, and short stories will follow the same general copyright rules as books:
NEWSPAPERS The Library of Congress has an extensive newspaper collection in its Chronicling America archive that you can search for free. My favorite site for newspaper research is Newspapers.com. I’m using it extensively to research a historical non-fiction book I’m writing, but you could just as easily use it to find stories that you want to record. It’s a paid site that offers subscribers access to over 1 billion digitized pages! They have a 7-day free trial so you can test it before subscribing. I like its download features:
I like to download the clipping as a JPG. The PDFs also are downloaded as images, so you’d need to run OCR on them to create editable text. For me, extracting the text from a JPG is faster than running OCR in Adobe Acrobat. I save the download file into Evernote and then tell Evernote to transcribe the text in the image. It’s akin to modern magic! When I have the transcribed text, I can edit and reformat it into a usable recording script. Once you download a newspaper image, you can transcribe the text in the image with your Apple iPhone, Android Phone, or on your computer. A Google search will reveal your options, including a number of 3rd party apps that also perform this function. You could narrate and publish a single story as I did with Nellie Bly’s interview of Susan B. Anthony titled “Champion of Her Sex”. If you know the date of a historical event, you can find newspapers that covered it. You could create an anthology of stories related to the same event. As another idea, you might find stories from a reporter you like and make a compilation of their work or read individual pieces. SHORT STORIES If you have or find a favorite author, their Wikipedia page or fan web sites might list their short stories. I Googled short stories in the public domain and saw a number of interesting results, including Library of Short Stories. The site’s creator Evan C. Lewis, who is a short story writer himself, has formatted and categorized 1000s of short stories in the Australian Public Domain. Be aware that Australia’s laws are different from the US, so I would research the copyright status for any story on this site that I might perform. You can also find short stories on Gutenberg.org and The Public Domain Review. Each of these links points to short stories on the site. I like to search HathiTrust.org for all my Public Domain works because it’s a consortium of college libraries where Google has scanned their holdings. In the late 1800s and early to mid 1900s, leading magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Collier’s, and The American Magazine featured short stories and serialized books from popular authors. You can find bound editions of these old magazines at your library and digitized on HathiTrust. You might also find old magazines on eBay and at flea markets and garage sales! On HathiTrust, you can search for “short stories” and change the Collection to either Title or Subject. I suggest you use the Advanced search as it will let you specify years and the language. This comment has more info about Advanced search. This one explains how to download a book from their collection. If you’re a member of NarratorsRoadmap.com, I will be glad to download a HathiTrust book for you. NarratorsRoadmap.com members also have access to my hand-curated collection of short stories on HathiTrust.org. As with newspaper stories, you can create your own collection. You might build it around a theme using works from different authors or a compendium of a single author’s work. Public Domain newspapers and short stories could be published as an audiobook or a podcast. You could even excerpt some words to illustrate graphics you share on social media. You’re only limited by your imagination how you might utilize these Public Domain works! Email: karen@karencommins.com |
By Karen Commins
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