Comment by alanwreath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alanwreath | Hacker News Reader

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I guess I kind of wish they would just offer the AI narration as a feature of Apple ebooks. Such that, if you buy the book, you can have ebooks read to you by your phone. I am really just buying books off audible with the subscription they offer. There are some books (tech books that is) that are offered as audio books and I gobble those up. There are, however, many more epub/digital books that I never buy not because I'm uninterested in the content but only because I don't have the time to sit down. I assume that for said books the audience isn't large enough (and may never be) to merit anyone ever recording the audiobook.

There are certain books that I think I'll always buy the non-AI variant because narrators can bring more than natural reading, they sometimes bring different characters (sometimes more feminine, more baritone, more stereotypical accents) -- and I would melt if AI could do that kind of voice acting.

Amazon at one time tried to add voice reading to Kindle books. Authors were absolutely livid. Audiobooks are a significant income source, and taking that away from authors is going to make authors decline to sell digital books on your platform. Apple is doing this right by making it an author's choice.

I totally see this point — I’m making a separate one for ebooks that aren’t getting purchased because they haven’t been (and probably never will be) narrated by a real human.

I agree with you. Apple making this an author choice avoids some authors being angry while enabling more sales for lower-volume books that as you point out, will otherwise not have an spoken version.

Yeah that would be cool and in a free-er market more friendly to healthily competitive innovation diversity, we'd already have natural-sounding narration built into every browser and reader; which would be an accessibility UX boon. But the publisher oligopoly wouldn't stand for it and there's not really much of an incentive for the marketplace monopsony-monopoly janus/jani to bake it into their products for free or a flat fee, even if the lawsuits from rights-holders standing to lose out on audiobook sales would be worth swatting away.

This should be a feature available for any text document. The existing iOS text-to-speech is almost barely adequate, but not really.

I use the iOS Speech Accessibility feature to listen to ebooks and it works great.

that is a good feature, it just seemed like the reading I'm hearing off of the samples for these audiobooks is a tad less robotic.

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