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Indeed. But this option will only be available if a critical mass is also willing to pay a few dollars more for human narration. In times of flat-fee Audiobook

Indeed. But this option will only be available if a critical mass is also willing to pay a few dollars more for human narration. In times of flat-fee Audiobook platforms the pressure to bring down audiobook production costs will only increase, funding a full-fledged Audiobook production for each book will only become harder to justify. Moreover, looking at what Apple describes here, they seemingly want to establish digital narration (quality) as a metric for competition between Audiobook marketplaces, not publishers. So if this works out, the major platforms will compete on digital narration and publishers will have less incentive to actually produce an Audiobook with human narrators...

ghaff 4y ago
That's fair and it's true of a lot of AI/ML versions of content. I still paid for human transcriptions of podcasts when I was doing them because the time needed to clean up the ML versions just wasn't a good return. But the day will certainly come when that calculus changes. I know nothing about the economics of audiobooks. And will note that there are free public domain audio books already https://librivox.org/ https://librivox.org/. But TTS will improve and, at a minimum, improved TTS will be a benefit for people who can't read for various reasons.
- rickdeckard 4y ago
  Well, an intent of Apple seems to be to break the price of an Audiobook into license and production cost, take control of the production using AI and pay only the publishing license, instead of having to buy the rights to sell an Audiobook as a separate work of Art (because in the end, their engine will create the work of Art from the written word). Sadly I don't see how this will make Audiobooks any better than human narration could. It's more about streaming platforms taking more control over the content and have experienced people train their proprietary TTS engine along the way. Just to avoid confusion on Librivox: They offer Audiobooks of works which are already in the public domain (so not only the Audiobook is in public domain, also the rights for the book have already expired). So it's a platform allowing people to make free narration of already-free content.

ghaff 4y ago

That's fair and it's true of a lot of AI/ML versions of content. I still paid for human transcriptions of podcasts when I was doing them because the time needed to clean up the ML versions just wasn't a good return. But the day will certainly come when that calculus changes. I know nothing about the economics of audiobooks. And will note that there are free public domain audio books already https://librivox.org/ https://librivox.org/. But TTS will improve and, at a minimum, improved TTS will be a benefit for people who can't read for various reasons.

rickdeckard 4y ago
Well, an intent of Apple seems to be to break the price of an Audiobook into license and production cost, take control of the production using AI and pay only the publishing license, instead of having to buy the rights to sell an Audiobook as a separate work of Art (because in the end, their engine will create the work of Art from the written word). Sadly I don't see how this will make Audiobooks any better than human narration could. It's more about streaming platforms taking more control over the content and have experienced people train their proprietary TTS engine along the way. Just to avoid confusion on Librivox: They offer Audiobooks of works which are already in the public domain (so not only the Audiobook is in public domain, also the rights for the book have already expired). So it's a platform allowing people to make free narration of already-free content.