Just lately, I ran across librivox.org, an open-source audiobook project. These folks read public-domain books, upload the recordings as MP3s, and then release them in the public domain. Pretty cool.
The project has been running itself via the Librivox forum, and has come up with a pretty decent workflow to allow people all over the world to participate in reading books. Heck, they even did The Importance of Being Earnest this way, with individual folks from around the world reading lines, and an editor putting it all together to make the final "performance".
But they're starting to get to the point where it'd be better to have a separate application to handle the workflow and act as a search engine for completed works. I started looking at Jifty for this and it looks like it might be just the thing. Stealing some code from Wifty (the Jifty wiki) looks like I can bang together a basic application in a short while -- if an already-underway PHP/MySQL project isn't done first. That one has some of the more experienced Librivoxers behind it, so it may end up being the system of choice; it's more likely to have captured the workflow for sure, as I'm looking at it from the outside, as opposed to being experienced in the process.
Still, as a slightly-more difficult application, this should be a good vehicle for me to learn Jifty, and I'm going to go ahead anyway, even if they don't use mine.
