Good idea, I think. I believe it would be better to say directly which browsers it works in, since e.g. 'Firefox' sounds more convincing (being a widely known name) than 'almost 25%' - you could mention the market share in the brackets.
Pawel ---- On Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:58:34 +0100 Holmes Wilson <[email protected]> wrote ---- Wanted to share a letter I sent to a publisher offering mp3s but not oggs of an author podcast. Eager for your thoughts on using this as a template in future campaigns. Holmes -- Dear []: I noticed that your service only provides books in MP3 format. MP3 is a format covered by software patents, and it doesn't work on my GNU/Linux computer, since free software developers face penalties for distributing players for patented formats--even when they write those players themselves. There's a new audio format called Ogg Vorbis that is not restricted by any patents. It also achieves a much higher sound quality for a given file size than MP3, and it works in a wide range of portable audio players, cellphones, and car stereos. It also works--without the need for any special plugins like Flash or Quicktime--in almost 25% of the world's web browsers. Wikipedia is exclusively using Ogg Vorbis (and a similar video format Ogg Theora) for all its audio and video offerings. In other words, this is something that is proven to work on large sites, at a large scale. The costs of converting your audiobooks to Ogg format are pretty minimal, it could be a small project for your team, and I'd be happy to provide them with some tools that could help. My organization, The Free Software Foundation, has an interest in promoting adoption of these free formats, and we may be able to arrange publicity for your announcement and your ongoing offering, if you decide to undertake this project. Please let me know if you can commit to offering your books as Ogg within the year. More info here: http://playogg.org/ Thanks, Holmes Wilson FSF Campaigns Manager
