[AndrewUnmuted]

I was a founding member of the ACX service, which is a partnership of sorts between Amazon's Audible and KDP properties. It allows self-published authors to have audiobooks made by voice actors of _highly_ varying degrees of talent + expertise, which then get sold on Amazon/Audible.

As the manager of the Audio QA team and its related internal technology services, I saw this kind of scammery on a daily basis. Amazon has actually a very weak policy against these kinds of scammers, because getting someone kicked off of the service for this kind of thing requires a lot of expensive and time-consuming legal work. Amazon likes avoiding this consequence whenver possible.

And yes, audiobook voice actors would try to turn all kinds of scams on us - from robo-voicing entire narrations, to resubmitting a prior-recorded audiobook under a different title and author credit.

When you open your media library to the dastardly UGC (user-generated content) world, these things will happen. The fact is that Amazon has become successful in monopolizing both book and audiobook distribution because they have figured out how to devalue the experience _just_ enough to extract as much scale as possible to out-perform the competition.