20,858 Public Domain Audio Books | Hacker News Reader

20,858 Public Domain Audio Books

librivox.org

130 pointssmooke18 comments

I really love librivox for what they've done and their mission, so please don't interpret this as a criticism. It simply is what it is, and I appreciate all the effort people have graciously donated to make life better and information more accessible for their fellow humans.

That said, the vast majority of the recordings from Librivox I've listened to are pretty bad. There are some narrators that are decent, but many are borderline unlistenable. For those, an AI voice narrator would be much better, even with the current state of TTS. Is anybody working on an effort to produce these works with an AI voice?

I think we're at least near the point where it's better to get the text and feed it to an AI reader app, that can be customized in various dimensions, like actor(s) and pace.

I have some favorite audio book narrators, like Patrick Tull, Stephan Fry and Stefan Rudnicki. Sure I'd rather have them read for me, but I'm not going to be able to afford that. I maybe could afford for their licensed AI mimic to read it, and that is an improvement over many random amateur contributors. With AI "personalities" it may become as simple as "have personality X read me text file Y, moderato".

Also it would be great to be able to conversationally control the narration. "Pause, hey what does that big word mean, go back two sentences and restart, stop, who is this Watson guy?, ok keep reading but adagio."

It is not just about the having a good voice, whilst that is important, you also need voice acting skills to show in the voice, as in a good voice actor would change their accent, tone, language, style for every character and seed it with emotion and so forth. A lot of thought (and skill) goes into it[1]

Stephen Fry is good for audio books because he is a talented voice actor amongst his many other skills. Attenborough is a treasure and known for his audio work, but he is not a voice actor - or at least doesn't do that kind of work which requires lot more range rather than one specific one we all recognize. I wouldn't like his voice style to narrate a fiction book for me.

A planned production with editing and nuanced prompting even with just AI voice actors will still vastly better for immersion than just an app doing it real time.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@tawnyplatis7866/shorts

I am such a fan of Patrick O'Brian's "Master and Commander" series of books that I could not let myself even consider the possibility of listening to audio book narrated version. I felt O'Brian's prose voice on the page was so powerfully distinctive that any attempt at putting a real voice to his material would be awful. Imagine my surprise when I found Patrick Tull's work shockingly good.

> … the vast majority of the recordings from Librivox I've listened to are pretty bad. There are some narrators that are decent, but many are borderline unlistenable.

Is there a name for this “value stuffing”? This seems to appeal to some form of subconscious hoarding. There is no possible way that you’ll listen to 20,000 audiobooks.

What’s the implication here? You can sample and make inferences about the rest. There’s a whole field called statistics that tells you how to do it.

He is right and pretty sure he was being generous in his description. I’ve tried listening to a few audiobooks there and almost all of them were bad. I only say almost because I didn’t listen to all of the audiobooks on there. I couldn’t get past a few minutes for any audiobook, and I listen to a decent number of audiobooks.

> Is there a name for this “value stuffing”? This seems to appeal to some form of subconscious hoarding. There is no possible way that you’ll listen to 20,000 audiobooks.

If you read what I said, I explicitly scope limited my criticism. It should be pretty clear that I didn't (and don't claim to have) listened to 20,000 audiobooks (emphasis added in quote below):

> That said, the vast majority of the recordings from Librivox I've listened to are pretty bad.

As sibling comment noted, there is an entire field called "statistics" that works by confidently making predictions about an entire population based on a reasonably sized sample. So even if I were applying my opinions to the entire library, it would still be reasonable. Over the years I've listened to at 500 to 600 hours of audiobooks from there, maybe even into the thousands.

Also, please explain what you mean by "some form of subconscious hoarding"

Sorry, not criticizing your comment. Totally agree that a lot of these are likely terrible narrations.

I am curious in general when features like this get marketed.

> There is no possible way that you’ll listen to 20,000 audiobooks.

No, but there is an easy way for you to want to listen to a specific 1 audiobook, and, all other things held equal, having more of them increases the odds of having the one you want.

Semi off topic, but i always thought it would be cool if there was a kind of multiplayer for ebooks - threads and notes in the margins similar to how dark souls lets you write brief hints for other players that you can hide around the game world.

Its impractical due to the technical and legal challenges, but it would be neat to see the thoughts of other readers page by page.

On kindles you can highlight passages and there's an option to see the most highlighted passages. Not quite the same as notes but a bit similar. I find it annoying and have it disabled however.

I thought you were going to say multiplayer for audiobooks. Different people could read for different characters and the listener could choose which voice they wanted to read for which parts.

Lots of audio recordings have a "background" that would be jarring to jump between, and getting those backgrounds identical is actually hard work for professionals.

I find remote interview-format podcasts sometimes hard to listen to because the audio quality jumps around so much, with background hisses appearing and disappearing.

This is really cool. Do they by chance offer a rate limited rsync access to archive everything? Asking in the event my small community gets cut off during an economic collapse. If so I would also set up a public rsync mirror.

I had a similar desire but wasn't able to find anything through Librivox directly. Not everything is up there (at least when I was checking), but I ended up going through archive.org for a number of big collections using the torrent option. I've been seeding some of those torrents now for years and they get very little traffic so I have no problem keeping them up indefinitely.

Not to be that guy but if your community gets cut off from the Internet in an economic collapse maybe audiobooks of public domain works are not super important

Just like in the movie Book of Eli [1] I will keep everyone's MP3 players charged. They can also come over and listen to solar powered Bluetooth speakers and their music, books, whatever. Maybe some children's books for the kiddos to keep some level of normalcy. This may be even more important should we go from economic collapse to societal collapse.

I appreciate you being that guy as I am often also that guy. We should form a club.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Eli

Coincidentally, I posted a somewhat related Show HN yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45657083

Crossover is that some of what we’ve done is curate some of the best librivox titles and enhance their audio quality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com