[harshreality]

I think this (pre-recorded) audio book thing is a short-term phenomenon that's creating an economic distortion. Recording audio books requires extra labor, but not much (how many person-hours does it take to record War and Peace compared to person-hours spent by each publisher publishing a new edition, even assuming the use of an existing translation?). Yet Audible rakes in huge amounts of cash by charging a premium (particularly popular titles) for audiobooks over regular ebooks. Sometimes it's because they get famous people to read books, which is a blatant cash grab by the voice artist and/or by Audible. You could find 10 people who have better reading voices than any particular famous person, unless your only objective is to hear your favorite famous person read a book, any book.

Also, subscription plans are designed around most people not using them fully, and not optimizing their purchases.

Soon enough neural net TTS + ebooks will be nearly equivalent, and doesn't cost any more than the base ebook. Plus TTS allows synchronizing between print and speech which you can't get between ebooks and audiobooks; i.e. it would be nice to read in print, then switch to TTS while commuting or working out, then back to print.

[thaumasiotes]

> You could find 10 people who have better reading voices than any particular famous person, unless your only objective is to hear your favorite famous person read a book, any book.

It can work. There's an Indian celebrity ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bappi_Lahiri ) who is famous for his great love of gold. And for the Hindi dub of Moana, he was cast as the voice of Tamatoa.

[paulgb]

With a Platinum subscription, Audible books work out to $11.50 each, which is sometimes cheaper than even the e-book version let alone a physical copy.

Narration quality is a big deal. I am pretty impressed with the latest TTS but if I'm going to spend 10-50+ hours listening to a single audiobook I will be happy to pay a few bucks for the best narration.