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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
There are a few companies doing audio dramas. The largest company I know of is Big Finish, which does completely new stories in existing settings in co-ordination with rights holders. They have a large number of Doctor Who stories, and at least a few Pathfinder RPG stories. The production quality is very high, including sound effects and hiring some of the Doctor Who actors to voice their characters in the audio drama, but the prices are also quite high for the length of content. Podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale (which has book adaptations) also come to mind.
There are also a few audio books where the audio book is clearly superior to the book. The audiobook version of Brandi Carlile's memoir contains almost 2 hours of music in addition to the entire text of the printed book.
That said, there's also value in making texts accessible to an audience that has difficulty reading. I love watching recorded plays that I'll never get the chance to see in person. Granted, the reasons plays are inaccessible (limited venues and times) are quite different from the reasons books are inaccessible (dyslexia and sight issues, for example), but it's still great to be able to share cultural works with people who have different accessibility requirements.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
David Goggins book , SEAL super tough dude that runs marathons on broken legs, has a narrator with breaks between chapters where narrator interviews him about what they just read or about the next section. Actually worked out pretty well. Thought it was smart.
Peter Attia, internet famous doctor, changed some things in his audiobook and included special things.
I only have 200-250 audiobooks unlike some here and those are the only two where something special is done for the format.
For a brief period I got into listening to classic radio dramas. Surprisingly hard to find. For as much screen time as I get, I do like to be able to just listen. Plus, I think it helps with my concentration.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
_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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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. "
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.
What I can't stand about a lot of audiobooks is that a lot of narrators have this weird way of speaking. You know how news anchors and reporters have a special news voice they go into? A lot of narrators do the same thing and it is so unnatural. It's awful!
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 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.
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.
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.