[HN Gopher] The Work of the Audiobook
___________________________________________________________________
The Work of the Audiobook
Author : url
Score : 51 points
Date : 2023-05-18 04:06 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lareviewofbooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lareviewofbooks.org)
| dalbasal wrote:
| 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 listeners haven't developed a
| distinct taste apart from book readers.
|
| Even though it has gotten huge... the audiobook industry is
| mostly byproduct and afterthought.
|
| Imagine how lame a podcast version of time magazine would be,
| with an audiobook-like, minimalist adaptation. About as good as
| watching a recorded play.
| nohaydeprobleme wrote:
| > "Imagine how lame a podcast version of time magazine would
| be, with an audiobook-like, minimalist adaptation. About as
| good as watching a recorded play."
|
| In fact, the minimalist podcast version of The Economist
| magazine (technically a weekly newspaper) is very good, where
| presenters read articles word-by-word. In 2018, "only 10
| percent of its app users listen to audio, but they tend to be
| very loyal." [1] I'm one of the regular listeners, because
| otherwise, I find it much more difficult to keep up with the
| magazine (it's easy to listen to while exercising or commuting,
| but when I have the free time to sit down and read, I usually
| prefer enjoying my time some other way).
|
| Similarly, The New Yorker and The Atlantic also have audio
| versions of a good number of their articles, too. Out of all
| the publications mentioned, The New Yorker's audio recordings
| sound to me, with the most distinctive with music and a radio
| drama-like voice actor. But overall, the adaptations are
| essentially indiscriminate from the written word.
|
| The goal of recorded news and magazine readings to understand
| the material to roughly have the same experience as the
| readers, where you can have your hands free to focus on
| something else. I never choose the audio version of the news
| because it's more entertaining, but rather because it's more
| convenient. So, the focus is on utility more than
| entertainment, though the material itself can be interesting.
|
| ~~
|
| Perhaps that is why audiobook listeners generally don't have a
| distinct taste apart from book readers. If the audiobook
| deviates noticeably from the content of a book, it no longer
| becomes an audiobook, but an adaptation inspired by the source
| material. Then, book readers and audiobook listeners can no
| longer closely relate, due to the changes in the story.
|
| At most, I do like audiobooks with a narrator with great voice
| acting to differentiate between the characters--for example, in
| an audiobook for Jane Austen's "Emma," the voice actor sounded
| very different for Emma & Harriet, and , Mr. Knightley & Frank
| Churchhill. The audiobook can also deviate from the source
| material in this sense, as the emotions expressed in dialogue
| are interpretations of the writer's intention (like the famous
| acting of "Harry, did you put your name in the Goblet of Fire?"
| in the film versus the book).
|
| But once more, if the audiobook deviates too much, the reader
| can feel cheated as the experience is too different from the
| original material. At that point of deviation, a producer would
| best promote this as a "re-imagining"--which would be fairly
| separate from the original.
|
| [1] https://digiday.com/media/economists-new-app-tries-keep-
| peop...
| archon wrote:
| > It's just surprising that audiobook listeners haven't
| developed a distinct taste apart from book readers.
|
| Sample size of 1, but: my taste in audiobooks does not
| perfectly overlap with my taste in dead-trees books. My
| audiobook library skews much more to the fiction end of things,
| while my dead-trees library contains more nonfiction. I also
| use audiobooks to re-read books I've already read.
|
| I enjoy the performance aspect of the audiobooks in its own
| right. The narrator makes or breaks my experience of the book,
| to such an extent that I have returned Audible books that _I
| have already read in dead-trees form and knew I liked_ because
| the narration was bad. I also suspect some of my favorite
| audiobooks would have ended up in the "donate/throw out" pile
| if I'd read them first on paper.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Me too, more or less. Your sample size if one is probably
| right.
|
| Yet... audiobooks' are still pretty much just books. There is
| no theatre-2-film difference between the mediums. It's more
| like hardbacks and soft covers.
| buu709 wrote:
| It's not exactly main stream but there are groups like
| Graphic Audio doing great work that will probably lead down
| this road.
|
| They do a full cast audiobook with sound effects, music,
| etc. and they tend to be altered slightly to work in the
| medeium - would not be surprised if the differences
| continue to grow.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I listen to a lot of audiobooks (I have about 1000 in Audible
| alone). I've also read 1000 or so books in print. For me it's
| become equivalent to reading print. My brain takes it in the
| same way. I now don't remember if I read a book in print or
| listened to it. This didn't happen at first, it took a while to
| get here. But at this point the medium is transparent to me.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I don't think that's true. Many popular series end up getting a
| full-cast recordings, and places like GraphicAudio even include
| sound-effects. But this is nothing new, Radio Dramas were
| around decades ago.
|
| Drama CDs are really popular in Japan as well. These usually
| include a full-cast recording with special effects.
|
| I do think it'll continue to grow more popular as the market
| continues to expand.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Hitchikers Guide was a radio-drama, originally. The book was
| not just a written version of the original. It's a distinct
| work, like a film adaptation of a novel.
|
| As you said, audio productions if all kinds are nothing new.
| That said, audiobooks are still mostly just an audio version
| of the book. They're not longer or shorter. They don't change
| the jokes.
| generated wrote:
| I've really enjoyed "graphic audio" adaptation of books with
| better sound effects, voices, and adaptations to the medium.
| Too bad it's not a wider selection.
|
| https://www.graphicaudio.net/
| dotancohen wrote:
| > No one watches recorded plays.
|
| Well, almost no one. Let's do the time warp again!
| 3littlefish wrote:
| Car journeys with the kids (and dog walks) are saved by good
| quality audio books (Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter and David
| Tenant reading the How to Train Your Dragon books are standout
| favourites).
|
| Its one of those rare areas where it's still crucial to have a
| trained and thinking human behind it - vocal ticks and
| pronunciation quirks are part of the charm. I think an AI reading
| would be sterile and produce an unpleasant uncanny valley
| response.
| macNchz wrote:
| Voice synthesis AI has gotten pretty impressive:
| https://www.audiostory.ai/2065785/12139903-a-fragment-from-t...
|
| I listen to a lot of audiobooks and have definitely sampled
| some with narrators I found harder to listen to than that.
|
| That said, there's a sort of droning evenness to the voice that
| makes me unsure I'd want to listen to an entire book's worth,
| and the voice reading Gatsby is way better than the voice
| reading Alice in Wonderland, which I definitely couldn't listen
| through.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| > which I definitely couldn't listen through.
|
| Some (presumably) professional human audiobook narrators have
| that effect on me!
| JZL003 wrote:
| A serial fiction book I read has only text but I still want
| an audio book. It takes a little bit to get used to but with
| text to speech, your mind figures it out and starts to put
| emotion in the monotone voice. It's not as good as a real
| narrator but Google's text to speech is maybe 60-70% as
| doable
| aaronvonbaron wrote:
| The first audiobook I played for my kids was How to Train Your
| Dragon. David Tennant did an amazing job. Now my kids love
| audiobooks. Although, I still need to force them to read paper
| books. We also loved the Zamonia series by Walter Moers.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Just William (read by Martin Jarvis) and Jeeves and Wooster
| audiobooks (various narrators, but obviously they must be
| British!) are also very good way to while away a journey.
|
| Though, if a child these days got up to half as much as
| William, the parents would be in jail for neglect and the child
| would be in care and up to his eyeballs in Ritalin. And that's
| before we get onto the Famous Five constantly trying to get
| themselves murdered by smugglers.
| 1bent wrote:
| I think of audiobooks as a very different form from books; I read
| lots of books, but listen to almost no audiobooks, though I've
| bought a few, and have listened to my favourite, Spider Robinson
| reading a collection of Heinlein short stories, a few times.
|
| For me, books allow me to listen (with my mind's inner voice) to
| the author's voice directly; a human's dramatic performance gets
| between my imagination and the author.
|
| When I want to enjoy hands- and eyes-free reading, I turn on TTS
| in my ebook-reading app; the mechanical, robotic voice doesn't
| get between me and the author. It's more like reading with my
| eyes.
|
| Back before Android, I'd use flite (Festival Lite, a simple,
| single-file, pure-C spinoff of the Festival TTS research project)
| to convert a few books from txt to wav, then to ogg, and load
| them on an iRiver before a long drive.
|
| I do like Librivox as a recommendation service; there's a lot of
| books in Project Gutenberg, but the ones that get to Librivox had
| one or more volunteers who thought that book worth the time and
| effort to read aloud.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| parkersweb wrote:
| I love audiobooks; I've listened to a massive number of them,
| I've read, recorded and edited for Librevox, I briefly looked at
| moving into audiobook production while I was a dubbing mixer on
| TV programs - and I'd still love to do it if I could.
|
| But audiobooks suffer from some of the same malaise as the
| publishing industry in general - in that it's both blessed and
| cursed by Amazon.
|
| Audible has a stranglehold on the audiobook market - but as
| Brandon Sanderson recently said "The deal Audible demands of ...
| [authors] ... is unconscionable". The fact that they only pay 40%
| of the sale price to the author for an _exclusive_ deal (25% if
| not exclusive) is frankly criminal.
|
| It's bad for authors, but the knock-on effects on the industry
| where one player has a 90% market-share and a exploitative
| relationship with the creators is considerable.
|
| About 12 years ago I spoke to one of the leading audiobook
| production studios about contract work editing audiobooks. The
| hourly rate they paid was terrible - barely a working wage. Worse
| still, the rate was based on per finished hour rather than per
| hour worked, so the liability for a poor quality reading /
| recording was entirely put on a contractor who had no control
| over it. Other engineers who were working in the field basically
| did the job for beer money between other gigs.
|
| So - I can't imagine that AI won't replace a great deal of
| audiobook production - but that's because even now, with best-
| selling authors the economics barely work thanks to one behemoth
| of a player. With lower volume books it'll be a labour of love or
| an AI reading that is the only viable means of production.
|
| [1] https://www.brandonsanderson.com/state-of-the-
| sanderson-2022...
| aabhay wrote:
| The 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.
| m463 wrote:
| 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.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| 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.
| dalbasal wrote:
| It's surprising that "cognitive" aspects of human speech seem
| to be "ahead" of more mechanical aspects like text-2-audio.
|
| Computers are or will be better at writing the book than most
| humans. They'll still need to hire a human narrator to make
| it sound good.
| loudmax wrote:
| I think the 1-2 years estimate is a bit short. Right now, a
| computer can create a droning audiobook out of a written
| book. Within the next few years, generative models will
| create cheap mediocre audiobooks.
|
| But the technology is changing very rapidly. I would expect
| that by 2030 generative models will have the ability to
| produce some very good audio. Possibly on par with
| professional human voice actors.
| brianaker wrote:
| 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.
| theSuda wrote:
| 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.
| causality0 wrote:
| It's not for everyone. Personally I detest "graphic audio"
| audiobooks, generally because they leave out all the
| descriptive prose from the book, both denying me the author's
| writing style and forcing me to trust the way they
| interpreted his descriptions are the same way I would have. I
| want to read a book with my ears, not watch a stage play
| without my eyes.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I dislike when it's a full cast, I actually prefer a single
| person to voice it. Having different voices makes it feel
| like I'm listening to a movie rather than reading a book.
| bouvin wrote:
| I 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.
| saargrin wrote:
| except when its an audiobook chances are you're gonna remember
| much less of it
|
| at least thats my experience
| dinkleberg wrote:
| Interesting. My experience is the opposite. If I've listened
| to a book, especially for fiction, I'll typically remember it
| completely. Whereas if I read it in text, the chances are not
| as good.
| jmondi wrote:
| I think this just depends on what style of learner you are.
| Me, I am definitely an audio learner. In school, I just
| needed to listen to the teacher say something once, and as
| long as I was paying attention during that, it would stick
| with me. Same with podcasts and audiobooks, I just remember
| them so well.
| monkeywork wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhgwIhB58PA&pp=ygUceW91IGFy
| Z...
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Sure there is no evidence that the popular depiction of
| "learning styles" has any effect on learning. But it's
| pretty obvious that everyone is different and will learn
| better from certain sources than others. It's just not
| able to be reduced to a simple concept like a style.
| ljf wrote:
| I don't know - I struggle to remember what I've read half the
| time. I listen to audio books while walking, and even now I
| can recall learning about King John (and there reason there
| has not been a king names John since him in the UK) while
| walking along the beach. As I do the walk again, similar
| parts of that book and others return to me.
|
| But might just be me!
| [deleted]
| damontal wrote:
| Sometimes I pass a place I've passed before while listening
| to an audiobook and have an immediate recall of what I was
| listening to at the time. It's like the place is associated
| with what I heard at the time.
| feintruled wrote:
| Yes! Me too! A quite inadvertent side-effect of audiobook
| listening on the go, you end up accidentally creating
| 'memory palaces'. On the other hand, if you tune out
| somewhat the story continues without you so sometimes you
| can end up missing a fair bit.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| In fact this is a common technique used for memorisation
| JZL003 wrote:
| Me too! It's fun, when an impactful event happens in the
| story and it's fixed
| arethuza wrote:
| Not just you - I have associations between various Scottish
| mountains and particular topics, so I might see a mountain
| in the distance and think something like "problems with
| economics" or "tank commander WW2"....
|
| e.g. Carn an t-Sagairt Mor and Carn a'Choire Bhoidheach are
| now forever linked in my memory with _Licence to be Bad How
| Economics Corrupted Us_.
| Handprint4469 wrote:
| What does it matter? Remembering is not necessary for
| enjoyment.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Indeed, as proven by the massive popularity of alcohol
| sBqQu3U0wH wrote:
| I could never listen to an audiobook. It just feels so cheap,
| fast, uncomfortable. I like rereading some of the paragraphs or
| sentences if I really like them, looking up footnotes, maps,
| diagrams and drawings (if there are any), putting the book back
| for a moment and starting again because I get lost in though (not
| always related to the book). Never imagined demand for audiobooks
| is so great.
| dendrite9 wrote:
| I rarely listen to audiobooks for similar reasons, I like to go
| back and reread lines that are worth rereading. Or I'll flip
| back and double check something, either a story point that
| might become relevant, or a fact I didn't grasp.
|
| But there are some advantage to audiobooks for example on road
| trips where several of us can get the same material and discuss
| it. I got a recording of 'Basin and Range' for a drive through
| Nevada to Salt Lake and back. Listening was interesting as we
| drove, but I'm glad I read the book first.
|
| Early on in 2020 I came across Kelly Cordes reading his book
| during the covid shutdowns. He's clearly not a voice actor, but
| his book is a story and history of climbing and I thought he
| did a good job with it. If not for that recording I probably
| wouldn't have tried listening to other books.
|
| https://kellycordes.com/book/audio-book-sort-of/
|
| "Professional audiobook narrators need not worry. I'm no
| threat. But during this coronavirus pandemic, when many
| climbers seem challenged by the social distancing directive
| (surprisingly enough to me--hell, I damn near invented social
| distancing), I figured this bizarre time makes a good time for
| storytime: I'm reading my book, The Tower, cover to cover, and
| releasing the readings for free, daily, no ads and no bullshit.
| "
| jfengel wrote:
| One interacts differently with audiobooks.
|
| When you read, you set aside time for it. It's all you do
| during that time. It's meant to be immersive.
|
| Audiobooks are meant to be consumed while you're doing
| something else: exercising, driving, eating, or something else
| that gets only partial attention. It's not impossible to sit
| down and _just_ read an audiobook, but it 's not the main use
| case.
|
| You might even want to read different books in different ways.
| Some books you want to devote your full attention to. Others
| might be best as light entertainment during other activities.
| nescioquid wrote:
| Consider podcasts. Most of them are (by contrast to audiobooks)
| low-effort and depend on a kind of parasocial relationship with
| the listener. You can listen to Joe Rogan or instead listen to
| a well-researched audiobook on modern maritime piracy or
| Byzantine history, for example.
|
| But if we're to listen to something more literary or more
| technical, I find myself joining company with you.
| lucas_membrane wrote:
| 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 that for all the
| quotations or only for the quotations that don't provide some
| good clue for the listener to infer that it is a quote. And
| nested quotes must sound just about atrocious, although I cannot
| remember hearing any. Why not?
|
| Another problem may be that publishers may develop modern
| technology that can make it difficult to pass an audiobook from
| one reader to another, even if it has been purchased. Used
| audiobooks on CD can be found (but not conveniently) at some
| thrift shops, typically less than $1.00 per hour of listnening,
| but CD as a medium for audiobook publishing seems to be now a
| dead end, and it is not possible to tell for sure by looking at a
| old and used CD whether or not it is in good enough condition to
| play on one's home or car equipment. The typical prices for new
| audiobooks (on whatever media they are published) appears to be
| approaching something closer to $5 per hour, and even used
| audiobooks sold on websites offering a large selection are often
| around half that much. I am around 40 hours per month of
| audiobook listening, and that is a little bit beyond my price
| point. Librivox is a great free source, but they are somewhat
| short of titles newer than 1922, if that matters to you.
| zuppy wrote:
| I think the limitations may come from how the author saw the
| final product. I have a good example where audo works (in my
| opinion) better than text on "Measure What Matters". Here you
| actually have some the people who had a significant impact on
| business & tech world telling their stories in their own voice.
|
| Most of the audiobooks are build as an afterthought on top of
| the original text.
| MoSattler wrote:
| I 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.
| egeozcan wrote:
| 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.
| FumblingBear wrote:
| 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 those things, but it's doing
| people a disservice to not give a heads up about how extreme
| it is when recommending it.
|
| Sorry for the bluntness of my reply, I appreciate you
| starting a recommendation thread! Just wanted to warn people
| that it's quite a few steps beyond most smut for the scenes
| that do include adult content.
| TimVulcanus wrote:
| Yeah, books like dungeon crawler carl are the rare kinds of
| audiobooks that significantly enhance the experience and are
| easily a better option to reading it.
| aedocw wrote:
| 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!
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(page generated 2023-05-18 23:01 UTC)