The Work of the Audiobook

Most of the audiobooks are build as an afterthought on top of the original text.

New Audible audiobooks come with a PDF, and the narrator says "see figure 1 for the figure I am about to describe" or something similar. A simple fix to your problem.

Sample size of 1, but: my taste in audiobooks does not perfectly overlap with my taste in dead-trees books. My audiobook library skews much more to the fiction end of things, while my dead-trees library contains more nonfiction. I also use audiobooks to re-read books I've already read.

I enjoy the performance aspect of the audiobooks in its own right. The narrator makes or breaks my experience of the book, to such an extent that I have returned Audible books that _I have already read in dead-trees form and knew I liked_ because the narration was bad. I also suspect some of my favorite audiobooks would have ended up in the "donate/throw out" pile if I'd read them first on paper.

Drama CDs are really popular in Japan as well. These usually include a full-cast recording with special effects.

I do think it'll continue to grow more popular as the market continues to expand.

In fact, the minimalist podcast version of The Economist magazine (technically a weekly newspaper) is very good, where presenters read articles word-by-word. In 2018, "only 10 percent of its app users listen to audio, but they tend to be very loyal." [1] I'm one of the regular listeners, because otherwise, I find it much more difficult to keep up with the magazine (it's easy to listen to while exercising or commuting, but when I have the free time to sit down and read, I usually prefer enjoying my time some other way).

Similarly, The New Yorker and The Atlantic also have audio versions of a good number of their articles, too. Out of all the publications mentioned, The New Yorker's audio recordings sound to me, with the most distinctive with music and a radio drama-like voice actor. But overall, the adaptations are essentially indiscriminate from the written word.

The goal of recorded news and magazine readings to understand the material to roughly have the same experience as the readers, where you can have your hands free to focus on something else. I never choose the audio version of the news because it's more entertaining, but rather because it's more convenient. So, the focus is on utility more than entertainment, though the material itself can be interesting.

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Perhaps that is why audiobook listeners generally don't have a distinct taste apart from book readers. If the audiobook deviates noticeably from the content of a book, it no longer becomes an audiobook, but an adaptation inspired by the source material. Then, book readers and audiobook listeners can no longer closely relate, due to the changes in the story.

At most, I do like audiobooks with a narrator with great voice acting to differentiate between the characters—for example, in an audiobook for Jane Austen's "Emma," the voice actor sounded very different for Emma & Harriet, and , Mr. Knightley & Frank Churchhill. The audiobook can also deviate from the source material in this sense, as the emotions expressed in dialogue are interpretations of the writer's intention (like the famous acting of "Harry, did you put your name in the Goblet of Fire?" in the film versus the book).

But once more, if the audiobook deviates too much, the reader can feel cheated as the experience is too different from the original material. At that point of deviation, a producer would best promote this as a "re-imagining"—which would be fairly separate from the original.

[1] https://digiday.com/media/economists-new-app-tries-keep-peop...

https://www.graphicaudio.net/

  > No one watches recorded plays.

There are also a few audio books where the audio book is clearly superior to the book. The audiobook version of Brandi Carlile's memoir contains almost 2 hours of music in addition to the entire text of the printed book.

That said, there's also value in making texts accessible to an audience that has difficulty reading. I love watching recorded plays that I'll never get the chance to see in person. Granted, the reasons plays are inaccessible (limited venues and times) are quite different from the reasons books are inaccessible (dyslexia and sight issues, for example), but it's still great to be able to share cultural works with people who have different accessibility requirements.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks and have definitely sampled some with narrators I found harder to listen to than that.

That said, there’s a sort of droning evenness to the voice that makes me unsure I’d want to listen to an entire book’s worth, and the voice reading Gatsby is way better than the voice reading Alice in Wonderland, which I definitely couldn’t listen through.

Though, if a child these days got up to half as much as William, the parents would be in jail for neglect and the child would be in care and up to his eyeballs in Ritalin. And that's before we get onto the Famous Five constantly trying to get themselves murdered by smugglers.

at least thats my experience

Quality seems fairly similar to Coqui-TTS, though maybe the intonation is a bit off.

I've generated a bunch of samples for comparison here: https://gitlab.com/danhawkes/piper-tts-test

Every character in the book can be voiced in a unique manner, with the narrator matching only the character as needed.

Additionally? Those voices can be tuned for the listener; an AI that has been trained for your preferences well beyond the simple matching that AirPods do today with an audiograph.

If you listen to Audiobooks, try listening to one that has been performed by a cast.

People pay for decent quality. I hate listening to artificial voices. I loved audiobooks narrated by wil wheaton.

I remember when kindle books first came out and everybody threw their books through OCR and books were full of typos and extra punctuation.

I suspect audiobooks that are read by synthesized voices will go through the same "uncanny-valley" dissatisfaction.

_good_ audiobooks require the reader to have consistent voices for each character, express the correct emotion for the particular scene, and intone some sort of personality into the book.

A good example is Kobna Holdbrook-Smith (https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Rivers-of-London-Audiobook/B004... listen to the free sample) He makes the characters different, and the main character PC grant comes alive in his voice.

A negative example is https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Breakfast-of-Champions-Audioboo... where John Malkovich lethargically stumbles his way through, like a bored supply teacher with a cracking hangover and no lesson plan.

Now, you can make very passable recordings of a book using something like amazon's polly. You can make it more bearable when you inject verbal clues using the markup tool. But. It still feels rubbish listening to it.

However its a shit tonne cheaper, so its probably going to seep in because people want profit more than art, but it would have to be made cheaper for it to take off. There is librevox who've been around for years. They have volunteers to read books and they distribute them with permissive licenses. However thats not as popular as audible. Partly because of content, partly performance.

But if we're to listen to something more literary or more technical, I find myself joining company with you.

When you read, you set aside time for it. It's all you do during that time. It's meant to be immersive.

Audiobooks are meant to be consumed while you're doing something else: exercising, driving, eating, or something else that gets only partial attention. It's not impossible to sit down and just read an audiobook, but it's not the main use case.

You might even want to read different books in different ways. Some books you want to devote your full attention to. Others might be best as light entertainment during other activities.

But there are some advantage to audiobooks for example on road trips where several of us can get the same material and discuss it. I got a recording of 'Basin and Range' for a drive through Nevada to Salt Lake and back. Listening was interesting as we drove, but I'm glad I read the book first.

Early on in 2020 I came across Kelly Cordes reading his book during the covid shutdowns. He's clearly not a voice actor, but his book is a story and history of climbing and I thought he did a good job with it. If not for that recording I probably wouldn't have tried listening to other books.

https://kellycordes.com/book/audio-book-sort-of/

"Professional audiobook narrators need not worry. I’m no threat. But during this coronavirus pandemic, when many climbers seem challenged by the social distancing directive (surprisingly enough to me—hell, I damn near invented social distancing), I figured this bizarre time makes a good time for storytime: I’m reading my book, The Tower, cover to cover, and releasing the readings for free, daily, no ads and no bullshit. "

Everybody-Loves-Large-Chests series by Neven Iliev

I'd also love to hear some litRPG recommendations from others.