Individual prices of books exist solely to push you towards the monthly x-many-books model - which is pretty good value.
I've been a member since 2005/6 (pre-amazon ownership) and I think my longest recurrent monthly thing.
Audiobooks were historically insanely expensive - I used to borrow massive folders of cassette taps from my library of 'unabridged books' back in the 90s. Staple of my family holidays trapped in a car.
Audible the company was the first/only as far as I'm aware company to work out that audiobooks were the 'premium podcast' and actually bother to sell them at a reasonable rate.
How come audio books can be as or even more expensive than the same book in paper format? There's no production, shipping, and so on involved with digital products, and the recording itself is a few hours with the voice talent, often the author themselves, and a few more people in a small studio.
I can actually answer that (due to random quirks in my life).
1) Opposite my office there used to be an audiobook company. Whole office of people built around a sound-booth where an actor would spend a week or so recording a book. I used to see the famousish coming out for smoke-breaks day-after-day. Maybe a dozen people, for a fortnight, to make 'an audiobook'
2) My wife used to work for a publishing company for hire (used to knock out Disney branded books for supermarkets and the like). Books cost practically nothing to print in China. Then could be shipped around and sold at the lowest of rates/margins.
Saying an audiobook costs nothing to record, is like saying a band could just publish their sheet-music.
So what's the approximate cost of recording an audio book then? Is it a lot more than preparing the text for print? How much does distribution cost compared to the paper version? My uneducated guess is that the profit margin on audio books are much higher than paperbacks, maybe hardbacks as well.
> An average audiobook created with Findaway Voices has about 50,000 words and costs between $1,000 and $2,000. We can estimate the cost of your audiobook by multiplying a per finished hour narrator rate with the estimated length of your finished recording. The longer the book, the higher the estimate will be.
Playing with the sliders, they seem to estimate that a 50K-word book will be 200 finished hours. Their narrators charge a $250-$500 rate per finished hour. ("Narrators charge by the length of the delivered audio, not how many hours go into preparing, recording, editing, mastering, proofing, etc.")
Famous actors can cost arbitrarily more, of course.
200 finished hours for a typical book seems very high to me. I'm listening to a lot of audiobooks from the library (free) and most non-fiction books are between 10 and 30 hours.
I've read and recorded books for fun in my free time for friends and the best I could manage (on my own) was about 2 to 4 hours per hour of completed recording. From sentences I had to re-record over and over again (either due to me not being able to get it right, or the cat intervening) then cutting, re-listening whether the pauses are okay, etc. For a professional recording six hours sounds about right.
Titus Welliver has started performing the Harry Bosch novels from Michael Connelly. The first half of his first performance was pretty rough and sounded like an in-store reading. Over the course of that book and the first bit of the second he really found his groove.
With this in mind, I never would have guessed that it took this long for the full process, but once its broken down into pieces, it makes sense and doesn't seem like a lot of time at all.
A little off-topic -- years ago This American Life had a short piece about an audiobook performer who used a closet in her hotel with a bunch of pillows as a booth... and she found herself locked in.. alone.
>Carin Gilfry explains how she once accidentally locked herself in a hotel closet, and because today’s show is being broadcast from an opera house stage, Ira is able to take the story to a place he never usually can. (18 minutes)
- often multiple hours in the studio because people make mistakes, they get tired, they want to re-do passages etc.
- during recording you want at the very least a sound technician, the voice talent, and a director/author/producer to listen in and give direction/corrections/adjustments on the reading
- after recording you need at least an editor, a director/producer to make sure the recording is cut correctly.
And then off to the presses (that is, converting RAW audio to whatever digital formats).
A designer may also be involved if the book requires a different cover.
Disclosure: I work at Storytel though not anywhere near (other than physically) audiobook recordings.
People do Librivox recordings free of charge as volunteers. Those recordings are just as good as Audible recordings. I myself, with rudimentary gear and a free DAW, can create an Audible level recording for the mere cost of my time. I'm going to have to totally reject your list of expenses. Sounds like a bunch of superfluous positions and bloat.
If you can't tell the difference between the average LibriVox recording and the average commercial audio book, there is no way you can produce an Audible level of recording.
Even if half the volunteering recorders and their gear were as good as those of the commercial offerings, just sitting and selecting those that are not good enough for publishing and those that require some re-recording is a massive extra work.
What is so special about Audible recordings that is unnattainable by Librivox? You mean sound quality? You mean some holy grail vocal mics? Or vocal talent? I don't get it.
Its not that high quality is unobtainable, it's that nobody at librivox seems to try to attain it. Sound quality is definitely uneven at librivox, ranging from poor to middling, and passages composed of multiple tales are rarely mixed together smoothly. The vocal talent is mostly adequate (I certainly find plenty of narrators I dislike on audible) but it also seems sort of unsupervised -- narrators who encounter unfamiliar words will mispronounce them. I honestly think they'd get more even results with TTS now that WaveNet is so good.
I'm impressed by what librivox has achieved with just volunteers, but the production values are nowhere near as high as most books on audible.
Ratings could be a partial fix for quality control but they have been opposing them for years (because they want to keep it fun and motivating for volunteer readers..): http://piratelibrary.com/2010/05/on-the-absence-of-ratings-a... (ratings are now available in some LibriVox apps though)
IMHO they are just doing injustice to a number of good readers in their catalogue who put real effort into their recordings, but get buried under those one can barely listen to.
Partly true. I've listened to a handful of excellent readers on LibriVox. For audiobooks I don't care if audio quality is sub-par as long as I understand every word and the reader is good.
There were even these incidents with people ripping the best recordings off LibriVox and selling them on Audible where they ended up achieving high ratings..
However, bad LibriVox experiences were one reason why I didn't truly "get" how superior audiobooks can be for years. Enduring their endless copyright and chapter announcements also hampered the experience a bit.
LibriVox derivatives have now fixed the problem of finding good readers in some of the apps with simple user ratings. I believe a similar project based on WaveNet will make much of LibriVox obsolete soon by being better than many readers there, which saddens me a bit since in principle LibriVox is a good project that simply promoted free sharing of information and knowledge.
Both AI and most of LibriVox have a lot to learn to even come close to the quality of the professional Gert Westphal reading of "The Magic Mountain", or to anything Stephen Fry has read.
> Those recordings are just as good as Audible recordings.
No. They are not. I tried listening to Don Quixote Librivox. While a couple of readers are tolerable, several are terrible, and none are close to professional voice actor level. Which makes it really hard to get through. Check out the comments here too if you don't want to subject yourself to listening to the reading itself:
you are making a good point imo. strange to me to read that audiobooks cost so much more than printed books. about the same amount of work goes into both. and i don't think people buy audiobooks because their favorite actor is narrating it. if they do then yes, they should be charged a lot. i also think maybe text to speech software makers need to get into that business. will drive the cost down a little.
Depending on how many books you read, it might be well worth buying a Platinum Membership. It costs $229.50/year and it comes with 24 credits, which means you pay $9.56 per book. After that you can buy additional credits for roughly the same rate, based on my purchase history it varies between $9.56 and $9.37 per credits.
I definitely wouldn't have bought as many as I have if it wasn't so cheap. I just recently passed my 400th book, which is pretty insane because there's still TONS of stuff for me to work through. Assuming each book was priced at $9.56, my library would be worth around ~$3,800. That's an amazing price! That's less money than I paid for my car, and the audiobooks have greatly enriched my life in all sorts of ways.
I do the same thing and have ~500 books so far. I started in 2014, so I buy around 100/year. The overall price is actually cheaper than buying paper/ebooks, considering I buy many new releases.
Also getting longer books is a really good value, since they cost the same. Just get Infinite Jest instead of 5 separate books.
Yep. Fifty hours of Netflix is fifteen dollars a month. Fifty hours of Audible content is close to a hundred bucks. Now, two dollars per hour is cheap compared to traditional entertainment like movie theaters and DVDs but downright insane compared to YouTube and Spotify.
You could get a library card and checkout DVDs, audiobooks and books for free. Podcasts are free. Network television is free. Assuming you are working and middle class the expensive part about consuming fifty hours of entertainment isn't spending $15 or $100. It's spending fifty hours of your attention.
People buying audiobooks aren't suckers, and most of them are spending much less than $2/hr.
Have you checked your library? It's not perfect but ours has a digital app with a large selection of audiobooks, all for free. It has greatly reduced my need to buy audible books.
Many comments on this thread seem to be confusing cost with value. I have both Libby and an Audible subscription. Libby - free, limited selection, clunky weird interface, long waits for books, production glitches. Audible - nearly every book, available now, good production, return any book anytime, fairly good app, costs $ every month. Up to you which is the best value.
Libby has a "clunky weird interface"? It's different, but it works really well. I think it's fantastic, and it's certainly better than the old Overdrive app.
As for a limited selection, that depends entirely on how many licences your library buys. My local library has a very good selection. Alas, it also has a lot of users, so some of the more popular books will have long hold lines.
Audiobooks in general are pretty expensive, especially when compared to the price of a print/digital book. The costs to produce one are higher, and the market is smaller (though the latter is changing, as the article shows).
Yes, you've been plugging this throughout the thread.
I've been working on writing a book and want to sell an audio book alongside it. Could you go ahead and record it for free for me so I can sell it to recoup my own costs?
No? Why not?
I'm glad there are volunteer projects out there, especially keeping public domain works available and accessible to more people. I'm even more glad that you feel that the quality of your work stands up to the quality of commercial work, as mentioned in other comments in this thread. I've not heard your audiobook recordings, so I'll abstain from comment on that front.
But why are you in here claiming that your volunteer work diminishes the paid work of others? Is that something to be proud of?
It's a variation on the theme "I own a DSLR camera and am capable of pushing the shutter button, therefore I don't understand how professional photographers can charge $$$$ for wedding photographs"
I've never recorded for Librivox. I just record music and have gear so I know what the work entails. I couldn't provide a voice actor's inherent vocal quality, which seems to be some neutral everyman's voice you could'nt put a face to. But if you want to pay someone so much money to read your book into a mic and do some basic editing that they could purchase a brand new car at the end of a weeks work then be my guest.
If you are in the US, check out Hoopla digital for quite a few good audio books you can borrow. Bonus: you’ve already paid for it through your local library.
Do they have any artificial restrictions? Last time I tried a similar app (it's been a few years), I wasn't able to get an audiobook because someone else already had it "checked out".
That's what feels strange to me, though. It's not a physical book that can only be in one place at a time, so why are we holding ourselves back with artificial limitations?
I suspect it has something to do with licensing, but I don't know for sure.
Yup. Have you also observed that the HN community has a vegan/vegetarian-bias?
People here jump to prompt criticism and ad hominem when there is a pro-meat submission. And right now that Burger King vegan burger loaded with questionable ingredients is being lauded as the greatest achievement in nutrition.
I dunno about the Vegan BK Whopper. But when apples cost > $1 each, head of cauliflower is $4.99, and yet you can buy chicken, cuts of beef, for the same price or less, something is up. That animal, raised, fed, given medical care, housed for some years. Seems like a lot of built in cost compared to seasonal produce. Either the government is subsidizing it up the wazoo and/or the meat industry in the US is King Kong size. Since it was mentioned, the same goes for the meat in the dollar menu. Ewww.
I think this is a pretty fair assessment as human nutrition needs can vary wildly based on a variety of factors. Some people obviously have nutritional deficiencies that are best addressed by eating meat. Most people need to eat more veggies. I think the omnivore's dilemma comes closest to a solid diet for humans.
In fact we have a lot of very solid science on nutrition. It's just that some companies with billions of dollars to lose are doing their best to confuse the issue and get everyone to give up, just as you have. It's straight out of big tobacco's playbook.
Well there's also many examples of people who pulled their own plug when the going got too laborious and they saw the writing on the wall. He could end up being one of those people. Not everyone changes their tune regarding this matter. Some grab a pistol; some jump out a window.
> No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun – for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax – This won’t hurt.
I set off an alarm recently that triggered much the same auditory effect. Also similar is if I listen to binaural beats for 10 minutes and remove the headphones. I have no idea what's going on there.
This would explain so much of electronic music. It also makes me wonder if there are any 'movies' of moving color that actually take place solely in the mind, with the aid of the after-images of what has come before?
It's a good question -- stains are a reason I assume shirts will be disposable in the end, but it's never been an issue with my jeans, at least not yet over 5 years.
I think it's because my black jeans and dark indigo jeans are dark enough that stains won't show, and my first pair that have turned lighter indigo have so much variation in color and texture across them that yeah, anything you can't wash out just kind of blends in? They basically wind up looking like this (which also shows what they look like after a bunch of darning):
Stains add personality to your jeans. These stains may reflect your work, or your passions, or just unfortunate coffee placement. Whatever it is, it's part of life, your life.
I have had issues with stains while wearing jeans while doing greasy work (particularly on engines) or when I got spray foam on my favorite pair. As long as I avoid grease and chemicals though, my jeans have never displayed any staining.
