[AndrewUnmuted]

I worked for Audible for five years, and this exact conversation was had often in my division (ACX.com - Audible's "Audiobook Creation Exchange".)

Audible brought ACX together in order to bolster its catalog. The company-wide initiative was called PTTM ('pedal to the metal') and ACX was Audible's secret weapon to gain an enormous competitive foothold over the rest of the audiobook industry. Because we paid amateurs dirt-cheap rates to record horrible, self-published crap (to which Amazon, Audible's parent company had the exclusive rights), Audible was able to bolster its numbers substantially in a short period of time.

The dirty not-so-secret behind this strategy was: nobody bought these particular audiobooks. These audio titles were not really made to be "purchased," but rather to bulk up Audible's bottom line. We knew that the ACX titles were not popular, because the amateur narrators' acting talents and audio production skills were remarkably subpar.

Neural nets may be able to narrow the gap between the pros and the lowest-common-denominator to the point where they can become the next "ACX," but frankly, it won't matter to audiobook listeners, because audiobook listeners don't buy "ACX" audiobooks. Books, even in audio form, are a major intellectual and temporal commitment (not to mention -- they tend to be pricey.) Customers will always want to buy the human-narrated version of a book - the professional production of a book. If that stops being offered, Audible will anger a lot of customers and I think Bezos has better shit to worry about than his puny audiobooks subsidiary.

Despite that, user-generated content is a secret weapon that a lot of websites wield effectively - including HN - but this is beginning to shed its effectiveness. Indeed, the next generation of cost-slashing-while-polluting-the-quality-of-your-catalog will belong to the neural nets. They may be able to get better sales than ACX titles do today with AI-generated audio content, but the actors are going nowhere.

[Falcon9]

I've listened to some LibriVox recordings of public domain works, notably A Princess of Mars. The price was right at the time, though the quality was, as you say, remarkably subpar. If I could have had a neural net read me the book instead of having to change with narrators changing every chapter, that would have been preferable.

That said, I have money now, so give me Todd McLaren narrating Altered Carbon for the cost of an Audible Credit every time.