Africa at the Internet Archive: Tiny Tales from Africa, volume 2

Normally on Friday I would be doing a spreadsheet update (see last week), but I have something exciting I wanted to share right away: I have now published the SECOND volume of the Tiny Tales from Africa: The Animals. I generated the book using Pressbooks just yesterday, so you'll find it now at the Internet Archive, and it's also available as an EPUB and other formats at Africa.LauraGibbs.net.

You can also find volume 1 at the Internet Archive, and here's the blog post I wrote about that book back in October: Tiny Tales from Africa.

Just like the first volume, this volume has 200 stories, and each story is just 100 words long. There are pictures for a lot of the stories too, thanks to all the generous photographers who share their work with CC licenses for reuse at Wikimedia and at Flickr, etc. 

The stories are not in a specific order, although there are mostly creation and aetiological stories at the beginning of the book, followed by stories about the most famous tricksters (like Tortoise, Rabbit, and Spider), and then more stories about animals, and finally stories that feature both humans and animals together. You can jump in anywhere, and with the search power of Internet Archive, you can search the book for any animal you are especially interested in. For example: here's a search for crocodile: 

Or you can search by a specific culture or country, like Liberia:

There's also an audiobook version at SoundCloud:

Laura Gibbs · Tiny Tales from African: The Animals, Volume 2

Each of the stories has a blog post that goes with it with additional notes and information about the story; you'll find the list of blog posts here: Volume 2. I've also updated the randomizer that you will see in the sidebar of this blog, and the "more info" links in those random stories will take you to the blog post for that story.

Very short stories like this are a bit unusual, I know, but it gives you a chance to quickly get an awareness of a huge number of folktales, and then when you find a specific animal character or a specific region you want to study in depth, then you can find more books to read with longer stories and even more detail. All the sources I used for this book are online at the Internet Archive (and I've blogged about many of those books at this blog!), so that means you can take a look at the original, longer versions of the story to see what I started from each time I created the 100-word version.

In addition to being free, these books are CC-licensed OER (online educational resources) so that teachers can adapt the materials in whatever ways might be most useful to them; the HTML version gives you a nice, clean text version if you want to copy-and-paste the text in order to adapt, remix, and reuse for your own purposes. You can find all the CC-license details for both Volume 1 and Volume 2, and if you have questions about that, just let me know. 

So, there you go: Volume 1 AND Volume 2 both await you at the Internet Archive, and if all goes well, I should have Volume 3 ready to go in April. There are already lots of stories taking shape for that next book which you can see here: new African tiny tales for volume 3. Enjoy! 

Tiny Tales from Africa:

The Animals, volume 2

by Laura Gibbs