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Comment by milofeynman | Hacker News Reader

This raises an interesting question around the rights of the author/publisher and who they sold their ebook rights to. If in 3 years we have a perfect AI voice that can read any book as good or better than mid-level narrators, why would you ever buy an audiobook when you could just buy the ebook and pick your voice(s). What a time to be alive

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The rise of streaming has made CDs and other offline media obsolete and publishing rights for them largely irrelevant. Audiobooks are likely to face a similar demise. One by one, all the frictions, I mean the colours of life, are fading away, sacrificed for the sake of convenience.

Edit: I think the effect of the invention of vinyl on live performers is more akin to how the commoditisation of HQ TTS will be detrimental to audiobook narrators.

I guess it's the same with other jobs: AI will replace the mid/low quality workers, but the good ones will keep delivering something AI can't.

Two audiobooks that come to my mind:

- The Lord of the Ring series read by Andy Serkis; not only he perfectly switches between each characters voice, but also the feeling of listening "Gollum" for ours is something else altogether

- David Goggins' books; the audiobook version is completely different than the book, since he's not just reading the book, and overall it makes the content easier to digest

I don't know if you remember but some of the earlier Kindles had both speakers and TTS built in but were sadly pressured to remove the feature.

https://chasingperfection.co.uk/post/2013/01/14/text-to-spee...

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