Apple now lets publishers, authors easily provide audiobooks

A pile of Motif photo books

Apple has quietly introduced digital narration for books sold at its online Apple Books service. This is a technology driven approach in which a robot reads your stories for you, though some publishers warn this might challenge the economics of the audiobook industry.

Perhaps it will.

Though it is debatable if those economics are well won, publishers still have control and those most likely to benefit are the authors and publishers who can’t afford voice over artists.

So, what is Apple doing?

In a quiet note on the Apple Books for Authors site it explains the move is driven because more and more people want to listen to audiobooks even while only a small number of titles have been converted in this way.

That leaves lots of books you’ll never hear, which if you think about it is also an accessibility issue. And, of course, many authors and small publishers just don’t have the resources to create audiobooks.

Apple tells us its digital narration combines advanced speech synthesis technology with contributions from linguists, quality control specialists, and audio engineers. The idea is that its tech can create good quality audiobook from an eBooks file.

There is a certain inevitability to it. Apple has been at the forefront of speech tech for a long while, and the company isn’t insisting every book be made available in this way, it’s a choice.

Publishers choosing to take the choice can authorize their titles for digital narration.

The audiobooks section tells you ‘narrated by Apple Books’

What happens next

To do so, Apple is working with third party partners who pull it all together.

When they do, the company’s tech will choose pre-created digital voices to read those titles. Now every book can be read by these, the company is beginning this attempt in the fiction and romance categories first and will begin non-fiction and self-development narration programs next. You can hear the narrator voices on Apple’s site.

[Also read: What is Apple Books for Authors?]

What’s potentially good about this is that it means books that might never become audible now have a chance to do so.

What I would like to see is Apple ingesting all the now copyright free titles available in the world and turning them into talking books. That would, I think, be a huge deal, as it could then potentially offer the world’s most important older books to listen to for free, which I think might be compelling. Though perhaps this already exists.

My caveat? Rather than worry about changing economics in audio books I’m somewhat more concerned how the success of ChatGPT suggests the Apple AI that reads the books may eventually write them.

Which I personally find quite challenging, for obvious reasons. You can take pity on an impecunious scribe with a small donation here. Now take a look at the greatest Apple books money can buy.

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