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Comment by asicsp | Hacker News Reader

>I found two companies only—in all of the deals I investigated—who are willing to take on Audible. Spotify and Speechify.

I wonder if they looked into general digital products companies like Gumroad as well.

>So I’m not putting these books on Audible. Not for a year at least. Maybe longer.

I hope there will be other authors who can make such statements in the coming months.

>The Lost Metal preorders were 75% audio—almost all through Audible.

I wouldn't have expected audio to be such a high percentage. I would've guessed about 20-30%.

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Stormlight Archive 5 title revealed. Okayish, but cool to see they are committed to ketek.

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>I wouldn't have expected audio to be such a high percentage. I would've guessed about 20-30%.

i follow a couple of authors that basically write their books with audiobooks in mind, because most of their orders come from audible.

i, myself, switched exclusively to audiobooks[0], and i couldn't be happier.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/DJgSfdX

I havnt purchased a book in 5 or more years now. I still buy dozens a year but they are audiobooks from audible now. I treat it the same way I do Steam for my video games. It is my one stop digital library of goods and if it doesn’t exist there it doesn’t exist and I move on to other options that are.

Michael Kramer, who reads many of his books on audible, is incredible. I enjoyed listening to several more than reading them because of him.

Him and Kate Reading did an excellent job with the Wheel of Time. He does so many different voices and really amplifies the emotion of a scene. Puts to bed any questions of basic voice to text replacing audiobooks in the near future.

Currently re-listening to WoT audiobooks (part way through The Great Hunt).

He is the best voice actor I've ever heard. He manages to give a distinct voice to the ridiculous number of characters, female, male, young, old, human, non-human. It really is quite insane.

Libro.fm is another good one, I use it exclusively instead of Audible and they give some (undisclosed and probably very small) portion of profits to your local bookstore. Sanderson's books are available there.

As per Peter Ahlstrom (https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/zspzde/state_of_th...) VP of Editorial Department:

>Libro.fm gives a low percentage of retail price for books bought on the credit system. Our retail price is $14.99, same as a credit. Libro.fm won’t let us say the books can only be bought at retail price and not with a credit.

Interesting. There are some books that are retail-only on Libro.fm (https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781483080703), but I guess they don't think Sanderson is big enough to let him do that. Everyone seems to be acting reasonably here, I think it's fine that Sanderson doesn't think this deal is worth it, but as a user it's obviously nice to be able to use credits and it seems like most publishers are ok with the tradeoff, as I don't think I've ever been unable get an audiobook through Libro (unless it doesn't exist anywhere).

Speculation, but I read Spotify here as Findaway, who were the largest non-Audible audiobook platform (underlying services like Scribd and other stores) before getting bought by Spotify earlier this year. He had to have been talking to them before the acquisition. It is disappointing that the only option outside Audible was (swallowed by) another monopolist, rent-seeking behemoth.

Wayne’s character is done really well by the audiobook narrator, Michael Kramer.

Scribd should be on that list, I’d think.

Does gumroad actually have good audio book management? Is it intending to take on position itself as an audible competitor? I'm not very familiar with Gumroad but it strikes me as a glorified shop and not a good media manager.

I have only used Gumroad for ebooks. I'd guess they would at least have some way to play the audio and may be even remember last location for users returning.

That said, I was suggesting Gumroad mainly for providing the files and let users use their own preferred apps. Sanderson's team has mentioned that currently they do not have bandwidth to host audio on their own site.

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