The Work of the Audiobook
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The Work of the Audiobook
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Re: The Work of the Audiobook
#2The interesting and fascinating thing about audiobooks is that we will likely within the next 1-2 years have essentially complete generative AI produced versions of everything imaginable, meaning that the definition of book and audiobook will become one and the same.
Re: The Work of the Audiobook
#3The interesting and fascinating thing about audiobooks is that we will likely within the next 1-2 years have essentially complete generative AI produced versions of everything imaginable, meaning that the definition of book and audiobook will become one and the same.
With AI?
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.
Re: The Work of the Audiobook
#4[dead]
Re: The Work of the Audiobook
#5I divide my listening time between audiobooks and podcasts. One thing that audiobooks have enabled me to do, that I probably never would have gotten around to do on my own (even as I do own the books), is to read classics like Rabelais' Gargantua or Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur.
Re: The Work of the Audiobook
#6The interesting and fascinating thing about audiobooks is that we will likely within the next 1-2 years have essentially complete generative AI produced versions of everything imaginable, meaning that the definition of book and audiobook will become one and the same.
With AI? 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.
You are right. Graphic Audio (graphicaudio.net) made me re-listen to Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive (all 4 books). With a cast, it becomes so much entertaining.
Re: The Work of the Audiobook
#7I recently really gotten into the „Dungeon Crawler Carl“ series.
It’s format really only appeals to me as audio - I would have never read the books.
Re: The Work of the Audiobook
#8I divide my listening time between audiobooks and podcasts. One thing that audiobooks have enabled me to do, that I probably never would have gotten around to do on my own (even as I do own the books), is to read classics like Rabelais' Gargantua or Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur.
except when its an audiobook chances are you're gonna remember much less of it
at least thats my experience
Re: The Work of the Audiobook
#9The interesting and fascinating thing about audiobooks is that we will likely within the next 1-2 years have essentially complete generative AI produced versions of everything imaginable, meaning that the definition of book and audiobook will become one and the same.
I wonder. won't it take longer?
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.
Re: The Work of the Audiobook
#10The interesting and fascinating thing about audiobooks is that we will likely within the next 1-2 years have essentially complete generative AI produced versions of everything imaginable, meaning that the definition of book and audiobook will become one and the same.
I don't think thats the case.
_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.