Format of Choice for a Legal, Free, Audio-eBook?

audioAuthor asks: "Let's say I have a recorded audio-book (no music, just speech), which I want to share with the world. What format should I use to distribute it? Main requirements would be: 'Everyone is allowed to redistribute it without any restrictions" and "Usable as widely as possible'. I have been thinking of MP3, Ogg Vorbis and Speex. MP3 would be really nice, as it's usable almost everywhere, even without a computer, but it has licensing problems which I don't quite understand. Speex is free and designed for speech, but it's not widely supported at the moment. I think that Ogg Vorbis is currently better supported than Speex, and also free, but not designed for speech and would take more space to achieve same quality. So what do you say? Which one of these should I choose, or are there other formats to consider?"

Why not all three?

[zhiwenchong]

It isn't that hard to release an audio book in all 3 formats.

What is your *real* goal?

[hoggoth]

Simple.
If you want to make a political/philosophical statement use Ogg Vorbis.
If you want no-one to ever bother listening to it use Speex.
If you want many people to listen to it use MP3.

flac

[dns_server]

Have you thaught about flac? http://flac.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]. it is another open source royalty free codec that supports lossless comporession which might be a good opion if you want high quality and no data loss because of compression.

If bandwidth is limited

[Julian Morrison]

...offer bit-torrents.

Bandwidth limitation really isn't an excuse, nowadays.

Re:All of them

[munpfazy]

Yup. "All of them" is the way to go.

MP3 is ubiquitous and great for almost any portable player. The only reason not to use it is because you like some other format and want to forcibly promote it. (Which assumes that your audience knows your work well enough to consider installing new software in order to hear you... which may or may not be true.) At least when using LAME, you can fine tune the compressing for the speaker to reduce file size pretty considerably.

Ogg vorbis is great for both philosophical and practical reasons, but you'll limit your audience since only a few portable player companies include support for it. If your background is quiet, you can really crank up the compression on a speach-only vorbis file before noticeably impacting quality.

Never used the speex, but there's no harm in offering it. Chances are few will use it.