8 ms·

Individual prices of books exist solely to push you towards the monthly x-many-books model - which is pretty good value. I've been a member since 2005/6 (pre-a

by goldcd 8y ago

Individual prices of books exist solely to push you towards the monthly x-many-books model - which is pretty good value. I've been a member since 2005/6 (pre-amazon ownership) and I think my longest recurrent monthly thing. Audiobooks were historically insanely expensive - I used to borrow massive folders of cassette taps from my library of 'unabridged books' back in the 90s. Staple of my family holidays trapped in a car. Audible the company was the first/only as far as I'm aware company to work out that audiobooks were the 'premium podcast' and actually bother to sell them at a reasonable rate.

sorenjan 8y ago
How come audio books can be as or even more expensive than the same book in paper format? There's no production, shipping, and so on involved with digital products, and the recording itself is a few hours with the voice talent, often the author themselves, and a few more people in a small studio.
- dmitriid 8y ago
  ”A few hours with a few people” is - often multiple hours in the studio because people make mistakes, they get tired, they want to re-do passages etc. - during recording you want at the very least a sound technician, the voice talent, and a director/author/producer to listen in and give direction/corrections/adjustments on the reading - after recording you need at least an editor, a director/producer to make sure the recording is cut correctly. And then off to the presses (that is, converting RAW audio to whatever digital formats). A designer may also be involved if the book requires a different cover. Disclosure: I work at Storytel though not anywhere near (other than physically) audiobook recordings.
  - _i____ii_______ 8y ago
    People do Librivox recordings free of charge as volunteers. Those recordings are just as good as Audible recordings. I myself, with rudimentary gear and a free DAW, can create an Audible level recording for the mere cost of my time. I'm going to have to totally reject your list of expenses. Sounds like a bunch of superfluous positions and bloat.
    - islanderfun 8y ago
      Isn't this the equivalent of "I can do Dropbox in one weekend"?
      - seattle_spring 8y ago
        Or, more recently, "someone with one week of JavaScript experience can replicate Airbnb."
    - zaat 8y ago
      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.
      - _i____ii_______ 8y ago
        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.
        dredmorbius 8y ago
        Mostly talent, production, and editing. I've listened to a few Librevox recordings. They're usually (though not always) tolerable. Occaisionlly good, but that's exceeding rare. Good audiobooks -- and a friend listens to many -- are far more often vastly superior. Even then, a poor reader is exceedingly grating. Libravox may improve with time. History of volunteer efforts has been compeling. But not yet.
        azeotropic 8y ago
        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.
- goldcd 8y ago
  I can actually answer that (due to random quirks in my life). 1) Opposite my office there used to be an audiobook company. Whole office of people built around a sound-booth where an actor would spend a week or so recording a book. I used to see the famousish coming out for smoke-breaks day-after-day. Maybe a dozen people, for a fortnight, to make 'an audiobook' 2) My wife used to work for a publishing company for hire (used to knock out Disney branded books for supermarkets and the like). Books cost practically nothing to print in China. Then could be shipped around and sold at the lowest of rates/margins. Saying an audiobook costs nothing to record, is like saying a band could just publish their sheet-music.
  - sorenjan 8y ago
    So what's the approximate cost of recording an audio book then? Is it a lot more than preparing the text for print? How much does distribution cost compared to the paper version? My uneducated guess is that the profit margin on audio books are much higher than paperbacks, maybe hardbacks as well.
    - dfabulich 8y ago
      https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+does+it+cost+to+record+an+audiobook https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+does+it+cost+to+rec... https://findawayvoices.com/pricing/ https://findawayvoices.com/pricing/ > An average audiobook created with Findaway Voices has about 50,000 words and costs between $1,000 and $2,000. We can estimate the cost of your audiobook by multiplying a per finished hour narrator rate with the estimated length of your finished recording. The longer the book, the higher the estimate will be. Playing with the sliders, they seem to estimate that a 50K-word book will be 200 finished hours. Their narrators charge a $250-$500 rate per finished hour. ("Narrators charge by the length of the delivered audio, not how many hours go into preparing, recording, editing, mastering, proofing, etc.") Famous actors can cost arbitrarily more, of course.
      - chihuahua 8y ago
        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.
- blondin 8y ago
  you are making a good point imo. strange to me to read that audiobooks cost so much more than printed books. about the same amount of work goes into both. and i don't think people buy audiobooks because their favorite actor is narrating it. if they do then yes, they should be charged a lot. i also think maybe text to speech software makers need to get into that business. will drive the cost down a little.
  - macintux 8y ago
    I assume the price of audiobooks reflects the fact that far fewer are purchased, so all of the engineering and voice work has to be recouped somehow. I've done a little voice work before. It is insanely tedious, even for a book I loved.

by goldcd 8y ago

sorenjan 8y ago

How come audio books can be as or even more expensive than the same book in paper format? There's no production, shipping, and so on involved with digital products, and the recording itself is a few hours with the voice talent, often the author themselves, and a few more people in a small studio.

dmitriid 8y ago
”A few hours with a few people” is - often multiple hours in the studio because people make mistakes, they get tired, they want to re-do passages etc. - during recording you want at the very least a sound technician, the voice talent, and a director/author/producer to listen in and give direction/corrections/adjustments on the reading - after recording you need at least an editor, a director/producer to make sure the recording is cut correctly. And then off to the presses (that is, converting RAW audio to whatever digital formats). A designer may also be involved if the book requires a different cover. Disclosure: I work at Storytel though not anywhere near (other than physically) audiobook recordings.
- _i____ii_______ 8y ago
  People do Librivox recordings free of charge as volunteers. Those recordings are just as good as Audible recordings. I myself, with rudimentary gear and a free DAW, can create an Audible level recording for the mere cost of my time. I'm going to have to totally reject your list of expenses. Sounds like a bunch of superfluous positions and bloat.
  - islanderfun 8y ago
    Isn't this the equivalent of "I can do Dropbox in one weekend"?
    - seattle_spring 8y ago
      Or, more recently, "someone with one week of JavaScript experience can replicate Airbnb."
  - zaat 8y ago
    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.
    - _i____ii_______ 8y ago
      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.
      - dredmorbius 8y ago
        Mostly talent, production, and editing. I've listened to a few Librevox recordings. They're usually (though not always) tolerable. Occaisionlly good, but that's exceeding rare. Good audiobooks -- and a friend listens to many -- are far more often vastly superior. Even then, a poor reader is exceedingly grating. Libravox may improve with time. History of volunteer efforts has been compeling. But not yet.
      - azeotropic 8y ago
        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.
goldcd 8y ago
I can actually answer that (due to random quirks in my life). 1) Opposite my office there used to be an audiobook company. Whole office of people built around a sound-booth where an actor would spend a week or so recording a book. I used to see the famousish coming out for smoke-breaks day-after-day. Maybe a dozen people, for a fortnight, to make 'an audiobook' 2) My wife used to work for a publishing company for hire (used to knock out Disney branded books for supermarkets and the like). Books cost practically nothing to print in China. Then could be shipped around and sold at the lowest of rates/margins. Saying an audiobook costs nothing to record, is like saying a band could just publish their sheet-music.
- sorenjan 8y ago
  So what's the approximate cost of recording an audio book then? Is it a lot more than preparing the text for print? How much does distribution cost compared to the paper version? My uneducated guess is that the profit margin on audio books are much higher than paperbacks, maybe hardbacks as well.
  - dfabulich 8y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+does+it+cost+to+record+an+audiobook https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+does+it+cost+to+rec... https://findawayvoices.com/pricing/ https://findawayvoices.com/pricing/ > An average audiobook created with Findaway Voices has about 50,000 words and costs between $1,000 and $2,000. We can estimate the cost of your audiobook by multiplying a per finished hour narrator rate with the estimated length of your finished recording. The longer the book, the higher the estimate will be. Playing with the sliders, they seem to estimate that a 50K-word book will be 200 finished hours. Their narrators charge a $250-$500 rate per finished hour. ("Narrators charge by the length of the delivered audio, not how many hours go into preparing, recording, editing, mastering, proofing, etc.") Famous actors can cost arbitrarily more, of course.
    - chihuahua 8y ago
      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.
blondin 8y ago
you are making a good point imo. strange to me to read that audiobooks cost so much more than printed books. about the same amount of work goes into both. and i don't think people buy audiobooks because their favorite actor is narrating it. if they do then yes, they should be charged a lot. i also think maybe text to speech software makers need to get into that business. will drive the cost down a little.
- macintux 8y ago
  I assume the price of audiobooks reflects the fact that far fewer are purchased, so all of the engineering and voice work has to be recouped somehow. I've done a little voice work before. It is insanely tedious, even for a book I loved.