20,858 Public Domain Audio Books

I really love librivox for what they've done and their mission, so please don't interpret this as a criticism. It simply is what it is, and I appreciate all the effort people have graciously donated to make life better and information more accessible for their fellow humans.

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?

> … 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.

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.

> 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.

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"