[nephihaha]

Audiobooks are heavily dependent on the reader. In one case, I had an audiobook where the translator was the reader. She is an excellent translator but a poor reader.

Many authors are poor readers of their own work.

They are certainly good while you are on a long drive etc, because they entertain you while doing some another task which you wouldn't be able to do while reading. During lockdown, I could not read due to the constant stress and fear mongering, but I had to walk a lot every day and the audiobooks were a good way to accompany that.

[estetlinus]

+1

The best audiobook I’ve ever listened to is Stephen Kings On Writing: A memoir of the Craft, read by the author. One of our times best storytellers, both when it comes to writing them and telling them.

[nephihaha]

I've a soft spot for that book because it saved me from two days of very long and dreary jury service. (They kept us sitting around all that time.) I think I read at least a third of it in there. The only court stuff I heard was for about ten minutes and incredibly unexciting.

[arach]

I've been building a little app on the side that allows me to primarily read my books in epub, mobi or pdf -> text format but generate readouts on demand for only the bits I want (highlight, paragraph, page, chapter) so that I can continue while I'm on the go, without having to bifurcate between apps - this might already exist but I made mine

Naturally, I also added the ability to highlight, leave notes and ... ask questions (via API)

Even with incredible models, it's a decent amount of work to get this to work nicely

[boznz]

When I write a character, I picture not just the character but the voice, same with reading, and going from a paper or eBook to an audio book usually breaks both. Books I write rarely include characters from Manchester (UK), so reading voices with my strong accent would definitely break a lot of my books. It is also the reason I sometimes don't enjoy movies if I have read the book. It is not a one way street though, some really good narrators can improve the experience a lot, same with good directors.