Spotify's push into audiobooks sparks concern among authors
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
* Only being paid when a book is finished is bogus. I have a few audio books that have listened to for only a portion of the book. The biggest example being Seveneve where I don't want to listen to part 3 again.
* The 15 hour monthly limit might begin to act as pressure to keep audio books length under 15 hours. Some in sci-fi can exceed that limit now.
Why sell one book when you can sell a three part series.
This means the 15 hour limit is likely to only affect older novels before publishers caught onto this strategy.
Of course, the trilogy or series trick happens often too. I'm not sure how new that is, or how much that is influenced by audio books.
I think the stretched out audio hits harder on podcasts, but it's in audio books too.
Since authors are just trying an idea, frequently the first part is a slog where the plot barely advances, then a final action chapter that ends with a cliffhanger. No wonder many never continue.
When I read this I instantly went to review my collection. To my surprise, approximately half, were under 15 hours. I would have thought for sure none I've listened to were under 15 hours, but like I said, half were.
In my opinion, Spotify audiobooks will fail because of limits like this. When my listening was at its peak, I would crush multiple books a month (at 1x even). If I were a customer, the first time I hit that limit would be the last day I was a customer.
This is the Silicon Valley B2C model writ large: charge below-market prices with VC funds, hoover up millions of users, go public, then use outside financing to cover the operating losses and invest in new business areas. Finally, when financing becomes expensive, start raising prices.
By the way, I would love a service where I could listen to HN. Play the first title and then wait for me to hit the space bar to play the next. Highlight the one I just heard, so when I'm interested int a submission, I have it right in front of me.
- Section headers are read just like regular body text, which is confusing
- Not great with reading numbers. Narrating a year is very different from narrating a monetary value.
- Parenthetical statements are read just like regular body text
It’s just missing some UX improvements now, mainly the ability to continue playing across multiple articles. It’s also not smart enough to skip boilerplate junk that appears on top and bottom of every newsletter, which is easy to skip over visually but a pain when read out loud.
A while ago, Amazon tried adding TTS to kindle and got immediately slammed by the publishers, so they withdrew it. However, with the current state of AI, I think users will start to demand it as a standard feature of anything they’re reading. Not only can it read at human-like capability, it can do so in any voice theoretically. Soon you’ll also be able to pause it and ask questions about what it just read or to summarize the rest of the article and so on.
https://www.kdpcommunity.com/s/article/Invite-Only-KDP-Beta-...
> Authors can set a list price between $3.99 and $14.99 and will receive a 40% royalty
Do they mean you get 40% of the work you created and they ran their model on? Oh lord. Let me run this through a TTS myself and publish it like that. Not sure if they even allow that though.
Audible's market share is like 60%, so you loose out on a lot if you don't publish there.
Before the acquisition, sonatics tech looked pretty cool. https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/13/spotify-is-acquiring-sonan...
that being said-- NOT A FAN. i want books read by human people who are good at reading to me. I dont want teddy ruxpin, i want my dad!
A colleague was saying to me that they would like to be able to have an ebook to read, but also to have it read out loud when driving or walking.
I think you need to set the Kindle app to continuous scrolling (in which case it won't work with older books), then you trigger the iOS screenreading shortcut, and off it goes.
But if you're looking for tech that can read it as well as a human can in terms of turning meaning into prosody -- all of the vocal inflections that we use and hear without even realizing it, the things that make it sound human and appropriate to the text -- that's hard to say. (Especially when you consider that most people are bad at audiobook narration, as it's a real skill.)
It might be very soon, if the kind of meaning embedded in LLM's turns out to be perfect for the job. Or it might be very far away, if it turns out that it requires building a kind of accurate model of human emotion and feeling and how that maps to vocal qualities, that has nothing to do with how LLM's work.
> Still, computer-generated voices have long struggled to hold the attention of listeners for long periods of time, and to overcome the ‘uncanny valley’ effect of synthetic human speech. Human intonation and inflection are notoriously difficult to predict and replicate.
I listen to a lot of audiobooks and I definitely notice and get annoyed when I don't like the narrator. I think I could maybe get used to this for one book but I would avoid it if possible, and I would really hate it if every book I listened to used this exact same style.
I would say this is probably already good enough for short non-fiction articles, but not there yet for fiction. It is genuinely confusing (for me at least) when an audiobook narrator reads a phrase with the "wrong" emotion, or doesn't vocally distinguish between characters.
It's perfectly fine for Siri responses or reading back a dictated text message. Not for listening to a whole book though.
Good modern audiobooks are a true performance even when the narrator isn't doing a bunch of highly distinct voices. You can't replace that with AI any more than you can replace a great voice actor.
Personally though, Spotify's audiobook user experience is paltry compared to a dedicated app.
This year I have been shifting content platforms, buying audio books from Libra.fm and buying eBooks from Kobo. That said I am still a loyal Amazon, Apple Books, and Google Play Books customer.
[0] https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a42189320/the-ne...
And more generally, what's so different between literature and other media?
For movies and music, we have streaming services where we have access to everything for a monthly fee, or we can buy one off physical or digital copies. For (audio) books, there is no equivalent to the streaming model, subscriptions are just giving you access to a set number of works per month. That's especially ironic since libraries have been "all you can read" since before computers even existed.
I have seen online libraries use ridiculous DRM schemes to emulate the fact that they have a limited number of copies to lend, why?
Video games are also not sold through "all you can play" platforms, but this is more understandable since they are more difficult to standardize due to their nature, and the monetization schemes are varied, and yet we are getting there.
(I work for Spotify now, but have no idea what the audiobook licensing is there, and couldn't tell you if I did know)
I just want to listen to music, but their app wants me to look at modal popups for promos I don't care about, and recommends me music genres that neither I nor anyone I know wants.
I'm worried that ZIRP and the demand to constantly grow will cause Spotify to enshittify itself into irrelevance.