20,858 Public Domain Audio Books

Just like in the movie Book of Eli [1] I will keep everyone's MP3 players charged. They can also come over and listen to solar powered Bluetooth speakers and their music, books, whatever. Maybe some children's books for the kiddos to keep some level of normalcy. This may be even more important should we go from economic collapse to societal collapse.

I appreciate you being that guy as I am often also that guy. We should form a club.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Eli

I am such a fan of Patrick O'Brian's "Master and Commander" series of books that I could not let myself even consider the possibility of listening to audio book narrated version. I felt O'Brian's prose voice on the page was so powerfully distinctive that any attempt at putting a real voice to his material would be awful. Imagine my surprise when I found Patrick Tull's work shockingly good.

It is not just about the having a good voice, whilst that is important, you also need voice acting skills to show in the voice, as in a good voice actor would change their accent, tone, language, style for every character and seed it with emotion and so forth. A lot of thought (and skill) goes into it[1]

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@tawnyplatis7866/shorts

> 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"

What’s the implication here? You can sample and make inferences about the rest. There’s a whole field called statistics that tells you how to do it.

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.

> There is no possible way that you’ll listen to 20,000 audiobooks.

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.

Lots of audio recordings have a "background" that would be jarring to jump between, and getting those backgrounds identical is actually hard work for professionals.

I find remote interview-format podcasts sometimes hard to listen to because the audio quality jumps around so much, with background hisses appearing and disappearing.