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The Work of the Audiobook

lareviewofbooks.org

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Re: The Work of the Audiobook

#61

Post by n4r9 »

dalbasal wrote: post #19

Audiobooks' recent history surprises me. I expected that if they continued to grow, audiobooks' and written books would undergo speciation. Books are a medium. Audiobooks are a different medium. Film may have dabbled in being recorded theatre... but it didn't remain there for long. No one watches recorded plays. Audiobooks have, mostly, stayed just audio versions of the book. It's just surprising that audiobook liste…

Authors will generally prefer to create a book rather than an audiobook. Great books hold a high status in culture. Audiobook versions provide a convenient and low-effort way to consume them.

Re: The Work of the Audiobook

#62

Post by BossingAround »

lucas_membrane wrote: post #14

I like audiobooks, but they have some limitations. Nonfiction -- for example. Figures, diagrams, photographs, ... don't translate to audio very smoothly. In a printed book, eyeballs can tell readers where the quotations, either in quotation marks or indented text blocks, start and end. But what does the audiobook narrator do with them. I hear some saying 'quote' and 'unquote.' But then I wonder whether they are doing…

> I like audiobooks, but they have some limitations. Nonfiction -- for example. Figures, diagrams, photographs, ... don't translate to audio very smoothly. In a printed book, eyeballs can tell readers where the quotations, either in quotation marks or indented text blocks, start and end. But what does the audiobook narrator do with them.

New Audible audiobooks come with a PDF, and the narrator says "see figure 1 for the figure I am about to describe" or something similar. A simple fix to your problem.

Re: The Work of the Audiobook

#63

Post by egeozcan »

FumblingBear wrote: post #40
egeozcan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like litRPG and some adult content/jokes are ok and you are not annoyed about the non-strict RPG elements, I can't recommend this series enough: Everybody-Loves-Large-Chests series by Neven Iliev I'd also love to hear some litRPG recommendations from others.

I'd probably give a more strong warning than just "some adult content/jokes" for this series. Maybe you're just desensitized or forgot how bad it can get at times, but it features a lot of extremely graphic sexual content that would, quite frankly, make most people uncomfortable at best, actually ill at worst. I can't really think of a trigger warning that doesn't apply to this series. I did enjoy the series despite…

I just finished the last book available as audio and yeah, now that I think of the first books, you are totally right!

Re: The Work of the Audiobook

#64

Post by lucas_membrane »

BossingAround wrote: post #62
lucas_membrane wrote: post #14

I like audiobooks, but they have some limitations. Nonfiction -- for example. Figures, diagrams, photographs, ... don't translate to audio very smoothly. In a printed book, eyeballs can tell readers where the quotations, either in quotation marks or indented text blocks, start and end. But what does the audiobook narrator do with them. I hear some saying 'quote' and 'unquote.' But then I wonder whether they are doing…

> I like audiobooks, but they have some limitations. Nonfiction -- for example. Figures, diagrams, photographs, ... don't translate to audio very smoothly. In a printed book, eyeballs can tell readers where the quotations, either in quotation marks or indented text blocks, start and end. But what does the audiobook narrator do with them. New Audible audiobooks come with a PDF, and the narrator says "see figure 1 for…

But I listen to audiobooks while exercising. No way to look at a computer screen or fool with a printed document. Same would be true for those who listen to the audiobooks while driving.

Re: The Work of the Audiobook

#65

Post by rentnorove »

aedocw wrote: post #38

Recently I wanted an audiobook version of a book I was going to read, but it didn't exist. I put this together using Coqui-TTS and the voice sounds really good. It's not as good as Eleven Labs, but it's far better than anything else I had previously heard. https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts If anyone knows of better TTS synthesizers that I could use please let me know!

Thanks for sharing! This is something I'm interested in as well. There's also Piper TTS: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper

Quality seems fairly similar to Coqui-TTS, though maybe the intonation is a bit off.

I've generated a bunch of samples for comparison here: https://gitlab.com/danhawkes/piper-tts-test

Re: The Work of the Audiobook

#66

Post by BossingAround »

lucas_membrane wrote: post #64
BossingAround wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like audiobooks, but they have some limitations. Nonfiction -- for example. Figures, diagrams, photographs, ... don't translate to audio very smoothly. In a printed book, eyeballs can tell readers where the quotations, either in quotation marks or indented text blocks, start and end. But what does the audiobook narrator do with them. New Audible audiobooks come with a PDF, and the narrator says "see figure 1 for…

But I listen to audiobooks while exercising. No way to look at a computer screen or fool with a printed document. Same would be true for those who listen to the audiobooks while driving.

You can always go back to that section later after exercising/driving. Of course there's no picture -> audio transformation with 0 information loss.
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