This is really cool. Do they by chance offer a rate limited rsync access to archive everything? Asking in the event my small community gets cut off during an economic collapse. If so I would also set up a public rsync mirror.
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That said, the vast majority of the recordings from Librivox I've listened to are pretty bad. There are some narrators that are decent, but many are borderline unlistenable. For those, an AI voice narrator would be much better, even with the current state of TTS. Is anybody working on an effort to produce these works with an AI voice?
Its impractical due to the technical and legal challenges, but it would be neat to see the thoughts of other readers page by page.
I have some favorite audio book narrators, like Patrick Tull, Stephan Fry and Stefan Rudnicki. Sure I'd rather have them read for me, but I'm not going to be able to afford that. I maybe could afford for their licensed AI mimic to read it, and that is an improvement over many random amateur contributors. With AI "personalities" it may become as simple as "have personality X read me text file Y, moderato".
Also it would be great to be able to conversationally control the narration. "Pause, hey what does that big word mean, go back two sentences and restart, stop, who is this Watson guy?, ok keep reading but adagio."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45657083
Crossover is that some of what we’ve done is curate some of the best librivox titles and enhance their audio quality.
Stephen Fry is good for audio books because he is a talented voice actor amongst his many other skills. Attenborough is a treasure and known for his audio work, but he is not a voice actor - or at least doesn't do that kind of work which requires lot more range rather than one specific one we all recognize. I wouldn't like his voice style to narrate a fiction book for me.
A planned production with editing and nuanced prompting even with just AI voice actors will still vastly better for immersion than just an app doing it real time.
Is there a name for this “value stuffing”? This seems to appeal to some form of subconscious hoarding. There is no possible way that you’ll listen to 20,000 audiobooks.
He is right and pretty sure he was being generous in his description. I’ve tried listening to a few audiobooks there and almost all of them were bad. I only say almost because I didn’t listen to all of the audiobooks on there. I couldn’t get past a few minutes for any audiobook, and I listen to a decent number of audiobooks.
If you read what I said, I explicitly scope limited my criticism. It should be pretty clear that I didn't (and don't claim to have) listened to 20,000 audiobooks (emphasis added in quote below):
> That said, the vast majority of the recordings from Librivox I've listened to are pretty bad.
As sibling comment noted, there is an entire field called "statistics" that works by confidently making predictions about an entire population based on a reasonably sized sample. So even if I were applying my opinions to the entire library, it would still be reasonable. Over the years I've listened to at 500 to 600 hours of audiobooks from there, maybe even into the thousands.
Also, please explain what you mean by "some form of subconscious hoarding"
No, but there is an easy way for you to want to listen to a specific 1 audiobook, and, all other things held equal, having more of them increases the odds of having the one you want.