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Comment by dmje | Hacker News Reader

So the model is - “first person pays, rest of community gets that audio for free”, have I understood that right?

Cos if so - cool, that’s a lovely model. And you should make more of it. There’s a definite feel good factor associated with this. You could probably also charge a bit more - $5 for a thing I get alone vs $10 for a thing that I get but everyone else gets for free too seems a no brainer incentive to me.

FWIW I find Omnivore[0] to be really compellingly realistic TTS. I don’t know what they use but it’s pretty great imo.

[0] https://omnivore.app/

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Or, the first person underwrites the initial generation, and then gets some credits as subsequent people pay a small amount.

Another way to do this would be to crowd fund. Instead of 1 person paying 50$ per book (just a random number, I dunno how much it costs) 10 people can pay 5$ each. 11th person onwards can get it for free.

You could also get some credits from these companies in return for advertising “this book is sponsored by blah company”

I answerd this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40963194

I like the idea of letting people donate the audio they purchased to the community.

Although I'm scared that I'll have no money.

LibriVox does this with people who volunteer to read everything. It’s an extremely time consuming endeavor for the readers but they ultimately choose to do so unpaid. Why not create a system that covers the cost of the TTS model at cost as to avoid profiting off of what exists in the public domain? That’s the spirit of things being in the public domain.

yeah, LibriVox is good and simple- no logins required: https://librivox.org/

Agreed, I should do this.

Although I still concerned about the costs of maintaining all these MP3s.

I checked out the omnivore TTS.

They're using a previous generation of TTS models, which most of the reader apps are using. They're reasonable, cheap, but sound noticeably worse than OpenAI's or 11Labs. I don't like them.

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