FSI Hardcopies / Audio Contributors

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FSI Hardcopies / Audio Contributors

Postby davidzweig on January 25th, 2011, 10:28 am

I put up a message some time ago in the forum about redoing the Chinese course. Since then, I have set up a small publishing company, and if all goes well, I hope to make nearly the full range of FSI courses (including those for less studied languages, and the Chinese course) available for sale as books. They will be sold via Amazon for between about $10 and $23, depending on the production costs. I'm waiting for the proofs for the first books now. I think people will appreciate having hard copies.

I have used the PDFs on this site as a starting point for about 1/3 of the courses. For the rest, I decided it would be worthwhile to have the original books rescanned in order to improve quality.

It's important to me that people who are buying these books have access to the best copies of the audio possible. I'd like to help improve the quality of the recordings on this site. The best thing would be to start with the original WAV or high-bitrate MP3 recordings from the contributors. If you are a contributor, or otherwise have a copy, you might burn them to a DVD and post them to me, or perhaps upload them to my account on rapidshare. If you send me a PM, I will send you the details. I will then run them through noise reduction algorithms in Abode Audition and re-encode them at a slightly higher bit-rate (most likely 56kps.) For the more popular courses, I will perhaps also divide the files up by exercise. I have a lot of experience with working with audio and noise reduction, and I think I can make a noticeable, and in some cases, quite dramatic improvement.

These files can be put up in place of the current ones, and I will also mirror them on my site for those who buy the books (doesn't seem fair to increase the admins hosting costs). If requested, I can put a link back to this page, or list the contributors on my page also.

If the whole project is a success, I'd be happy to make a donation, which could be used as a bounty for missing FSI books or audio (FSI Czech Basic Course, perhaps?), or otherwise for other costs.

Look forward to hearing from you,

David
davidzweig
 
Posts: 5
Joined: September 22nd, 2010, 3:11 am

Re: FSI Hardcopies / Audio Contributors

Postby davidzweig on January 29th, 2011, 7:29 am

I got the proofs yesterday, and they look fine. The first couple of books should be on Amazon within a few days. They are:

Standard Chinese: A Modular Approach, Resource Modules (ISBN 978-0-9567215-3-2 )
Foreign Service Institute Portuguese Programmatic Course Volume II (ISBN 978-0-9567215-8-7 )

Another seven books will follow next week. The website (http://www.omilialanguages.com) will also be up soon, this weekend hopefully. For the audio contributors (Oberon, DemiPuppet, MartinS, onebir, liddytime, and others) I'd be happy to compensate your efforts in sending me the files with free books :-). Shall we say, two books for the first 'volume' of audio (i.e. the audio corresponding to one book) you send, and then one book per audio 'volume' thereafter. I'll work out the details and post again within a couple of weeks. As I said, I'll put the results online for all to use.
davidzweig
 
Posts: 5
Joined: September 22nd, 2010, 3:11 am


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