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Audible and audiobooks, the fastest growing part of publishing

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Re: Audible and audiobooks, the fastest growing part of publishing

#141

Post by azeotropic »

_i____ii_______ wrote: post #94
zaat wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't tell the difference between the average LibriVox recording and the average commercial audio book, there is no way you can produce an Audible level of recording. Even if half the volunteering recorders and their gear were as good as those of the commercial offerings, just sitting and selecting those that are not good enough for publishing and those that require some re-recording is a massive extra work.

What is so special about Audible recordings that is unnattainable by Librivox? You mean sound quality? You mean some holy grail vocal mics? Or vocal talent? I don't get it.

Its not that high quality is unobtainable, it's that nobody at librivox seems to try to attain it. Sound quality is definitely uneven at librivox, ranging from poor to middling, and passages composed of multiple tales are rarely mixed together smoothly. The vocal talent is mostly adequate (I certainly find plenty of narrators I dislike on audible) but it also seems sort of unsupervised -- narrators who encounter unfamiliar words will mispronounce them. I honestly think they'd get more even results with TTS now that WaveNet is so good.

I'm impressed by what librivox has achieved with just volunteers, but the production values are nowhere near as high as most books on audible.

Re: Audible and audiobooks, the fastest growing part of publishing

#142

Post by crummy »

lefstathiou wrote: post #83

I can’t resist the temptation to ask given this thread is on HN (a community I love) and Audible is a passion... for those who love Audible and Audio books, would you mind sharing 2-3 you particularly enjoyed? I’m always hunting for new ones. Here are some I would recommend: Management 1. Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People 2. Getting to Yes Great book on negotiation in life and business 3. The Ha…

The story of the Endurance on its own is edge-of-your-seat stuff, but the audiobook is absolutely top notch. The story is woven perfectly and the narration is perfect. It's probably the best audiobook I've listened to.

Re: Audible and audiobooks, the fastest growing part of publishing

#143

Post by ygra »

stevewillows wrote: post #84
chihuahua wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200 finished hours for a typical book seems very high to me. I'm listening to a lot of audiobooks from the library (free) and most non-fiction books are between 10 and 30 hours.

An audiobook takes about six hours [1] to nail down one hour of final recording. [1] https://audible-acx.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/664...

I've read and recorded books for fun in my free time for friends and the best I could manage (on my own) was about 2 to 4 hours per hour of completed recording. From sentences I had to re-record over and over again (either due to me not being able to get it right, or the cat intervening) then cutting, re-listening whether the pauses are okay, etc. For a professional recording six hours sounds about right.

Re: Audible and audiobooks, the fastest growing part of publishing

#144

Post by stevewillows »

ygra wrote: post #143
stevewillows wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An audiobook takes about six hours [1] to nail down one hour of final recording. [1] https://audible-acx.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/664...

I've read and recorded books for fun in my free time for friends and the best I could manage (on my own) was about 2 to 4 hours per hour of completed recording. From sentences I had to re-record over and over again (either due to me not being able to get it right, or the cat intervening) then cutting, re-listening whether the pauses are okay, etc. For a professional recording six hours sounds about right.

it sounds exhausting.

Titus Welliver has started performing the Harry Bosch novels from Michael Connelly. The first half of his first performance was pretty rough and sounded like an in-store reading. Over the course of that book and the first bit of the second he really found his groove.

With this in mind, I never would have guessed that it took this long for the full process, but once its broken down into pieces, it makes sense and doesn't seem like a lot of time at all.

A little off-topic -- years ago This American Life had a short piece about an audiobook performer who used a closet in her hotel with a bunch of pillows as a booth... and she found herself locked in.. alone.

>Carin Gilfry explains how she once accidentally locked herself in a hotel closet, and because today’s show is being broadcast from an opera house stage, Ira is able to take the story to a place he never usually can. (18 minutes)

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/528/the-radio-drama-episode...

Re: Audible and audiobooks, the fastest growing part of publishing

#145

Post by DanielleMolloy »

azeotropic wrote: post #141
_i____ii_______ wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is so special about Audible recordings that is unnattainable by Librivox? You mean sound quality? You mean some holy grail vocal mics? Or vocal talent? I don't get it.

Its not that high quality is unobtainable, it's that nobody at librivox seems to try to attain it. Sound quality is definitely uneven at librivox, ranging from poor to middling, and passages composed of multiple tales are rarely mixed together smoothly. The vocal talent is mostly adequate (I certainly find plenty of narrators I dislike on audible) but it also seems sort of unsupervised -- narrators who encounter unfa…

Ratings could be a partial fix for quality control but they have been opposing them for years (because they want to keep it fun and motivating for volunteer readers..): http://piratelibrary.com/2010/05/on-the-absence-of-ratings-a... (ratings are now available in some LibriVox apps though)

IMHO they are just doing injustice to a number of good readers in their catalogue who put real effort into their recordings, but get buried under those one can barely listen to.

Re: Audible and audiobooks, the fastest growing part of publishing

#146

Post by listenandlearn »

nsomaru wrote: post #132
listenandlearn wrote: post #90

I absolutely love Audio Books, I think I went through maybe 25+ audio books, mostly non fiction, in 2018 alone. It is a fantastic way to maximize dead time, but generally I think non music audio is going through a sort of renaissance. While the author of this post is really distraught about Amazons dominance with Audible I do think in some ways non music audio is much bigger than just Audibooks for example Podcasts a…

I’ve been using your app for 2 months on the free plan after seeing you link it here. The site dailymaverick.co.za which I frequent has built in AI-read voice for articles provided by a third party service. For some reason, Articulu fails to convert some of the articles, which curiously also do not have a converted audio for their third party service. The failure state is not very graceful. There’s a couple issues wi…

Thank you for using the app, sorry that your having those issues. I will look into all of those.

Any chance you can shot an email to support@articulu.com, so we can see the account, and let us know if your on iOS or Android. Any of the Failed URLs will also be really helpful so we can make the scraping more resilient. We are working hard to add features that help organize articles better.

Re: Audible and audiobooks, the fastest growing part of publishing

#147

Post by jogjayr »

tty2300 wrote: post #55
steve19 wrote: post #47

People complaining forget what the industry was like before audible. It was terrible. Audiobook cost an absolute fortune, and selections were very limited. Audiobooks in the late 20th century were, I imagine, simular to paper books in 18th century. Something most of the population could not afford to own. I have been listening, and loving, audiobook for a very long time audible was, and still is, a breath of fresh ai…

Before online audio books we borrowed then from the library for free.

I still borrow audio books from the library for free using the Libby app.

Re: Audible and audiobooks, the fastest growing part of publishing

#148

Post by xnyan »

HlessClaudesman wrote: post #124

I really enjoy audiobooks, but I dont think Audible is letting the medium flourish to its full potential. My main concern is that audible is missing the long tail which naturally forms in any price sensitive market, where older products tend to depreciate to the point where they find a buyer. With paper books I can find an old book for cheap and that is great for a lover of words. Audible distorts the audio-book mark…

There are often good deals to be had on Amazon for audiobooks, as others have mentioned older audiobooks can be found for as little as $2, though for moderately popular ones its more like $10-15.

Very popular audiobooks don't go on sale as often, but even the complete set of Stephen Fry read Harry potter 7-book-series, hundreds of hours, can be had for as little as 20 bucks sometimes.

Re: Audible and audiobooks, the fastest growing part of publishing

#149

Post by xnyan »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #117
gnicholas wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that libraries have some responsibility here. But as it happens, my conversation with this OverDrive exec was pursuant to a letter signed by librarians representing hundreds of libraries, asking OverDrive to offer a particular accessibility feature, and giving detailed reasons for why it would help library patrons. Even with this supporting information and the backing of hundreds of libraries, OverDrive was n…

In the letter from the librarians, was the feature described as: A) Must-have (e.g. if we don't have it, we'll be breaking the law, and so can't/won't renew the contract to use Libby), or B) Nice-to-have? If A, then I'm surprised at OverDrive's response. If B, then I'm curious to know how much the librarians offered to pay. If OverDrive can't make a profit from a feature, then either it's not that important to the pe…

You are hitting the nail on the head with the latter part of your comment. The issue is licensing and content rights which is a huge mess to do without pissing off rights holders. They are all terrified someone might look at their content without paying, and make customers jump through huge hoops to pay for it.

I wish I would just pirate ebooks and audiobooks because that is the simplest and lowest effort way to see the content. It would work on all my devices and I would not have to worry about signing in or swapping apps to find which service has that book I want to read this month only.

Re: Audible and audiobooks, the fastest growing part of publishing

#150

Post by johnnydoe9 »

Microsoft had ebooks until pretty recently but I only found out about it because of the news about the cancellation of the service. Google Books added audiobooks a while ago but why they don't advertise on YouTube videos and podcasts I'll never understand.
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