about audiobooks…

All the books listed on this site are now available as Apple Books audiobooks, read by a digital voice based on a small range of choosable human narrators. Current sources are Apple Books, and in the not-too-distant future on OverDrive.

For quality control purposes, I’ve spent many hours listening to a variety of Apple digital voices reading different books of mine. Since many of my novels contain names of people and places, as well as just normal words that either are neologisms or else on which the voices simply haven’t been trained—if only because my vocabulary often shows traces of my Vancean literary upbringing😉—there are glitches and pronunciations that I had not intended when I wrote the books. This applies especially to the Tethys novels, as well as Seladiënna. However, I’ve found that for the Tethys series, despite the unintended pronunciations, the readings are surprisingly glitch-free and, despite me being predictably critical and wishing they were perfect, I thought that their prices—in Australia, with two exceptions, $AU10 or less, which maxes out at $US7 at the time I write this—more than make up for the occasional small imperfections.
I can revise them after six months of them being available; which is what I’m going to do for those novels that have issues qualifying as ‘annoying’. Also, as time goes on the digital narration technology will continue to improve, so that hopefully will bring them closer to perfection.

📝 I recently downloaded an audio book, rendered by a major and very reputable ‘real person’ reader, of Ben Bova’s Voyagers. Don’t know if it’s just me, but I found that the reader’s voice interfered with the story so much that I stopped listening and decided to reread the novel in hardcopy instead. All the Ben Bova audiobooks are read by the same person, which means I’m not going to listen to the sequels either. I found similar issues with other ‘real’ human voices when sampling audiobooks from our local library through BorrowBox. And then I tried a snipped from an Audible reading of Jack Vance’s The Green Pearl. Here I found that the reading affected me very differently; the voice, enunciation, emphasis, timing… Maybe it’s just me, a deep admirer of Jack’s work. But I suspect that this reader definitely would not have been Jack’s choice. Not sure which of these two ‘human’ readers were more objectionable. Again, I hasten to add, to me at least.

By contrast, as an example, the digital (US) ‘Warren’ voice I’m using for the Tethys novels is far less intrusive on the stories. Could be because it’s more neutral, yet capable of expressing emotions and even varying between reflecting male and female speech. Definitely not perfect, mainly because of the AI guiding the voice and its cadences, intonations, pronunciations etc. Still, the flaws only minimally interfered with the story. To quote Jack Vance: “A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone's written the story. He's supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.” Replace ‘reader’ by ‘listener’ and ‘someone’s written the story’ by ‘someone’s reading the story’…

A lot of readers imprint too much of themselves—e.g. through emphasis, tone, pitch, timing, as well as those other elements a live storyteller might use at, say, a book reading or around a camp fire or wherever s/he faces a live audience— and thereby also their interpretation of the story; what matters and what doesn’t; what the listener should pay special attention to, even—possibly subtly though implicitly—their like or dislike of elements or parts of the story and its characters. That doesn’t happen in a physical book during its reading, be that visual, e.g. hard copy or screen, or by touch, such as through a reading with braille. There are just the written words connecting author and the reader.

Audiobooks, at least in my opinion, should preserve, as much as this is possible, that kind of connection. One of the reasons why I think I may actually prefer digital voice; the version derived from a real human voice, but which does not interpret, but renders as faithfully as possible, sticks as closely to the author’s text—words, sentence structure, punctuation marks’ significance, etc— as possible, allowing the listener to make up her own mind and construct her own understanding of and relationship with the story. That needs an unbiased human reader. Sounds like an irresolvable contradiction, but it looks to me like advanced digital voices reading a text are getting closer. Maybe currently improving audiobook technology is one of the better aspects of AI used in a beneficial way. Time will tell..

Bottom line, if you like audio books and you have access to Apple Books and you want to try some science fiction/fantasy that doesn’t cowtow to the current, rather dull, sf&f Zeitgeist, maybe try Keaen as an audiobook and see where you go from there. If you’re not sure about the genre, maybe have a peek at the Tethys page on this site (will open in a new tab/window). If you’re not into sf&f, try a different audio book from those available. There are male and female digital voices, not all of them fully explored by me yet.

🤔 Any feedback on the quality of the digital narrations of any of my books? What worked? What didn’t work? What about the accent? Changing pitch, loudness, timing? Was the voice’s ‘sex’—meaning the influence of mainly physiological elements such as respiratory system, pharynx, mouth cavity, vocal folds, throat, nasal passages, tongue, soft palate, lips on the sound—appropriate for the reading? Spotted any actually explicitly vocalized ‘use male/female voice’ types of instructions, no doubt inserted into the eBook text by an AI? I just caught one near the end of Keaen. A total of less than ten for a book of 150k words, so that’s not too bad. Easier to deal with than annoying reader’s voices overlaying their personal idiosyncrasies and interpretations over the author’s voice, the text, and what the author intended to convey when s/he penned the story.

Please use this page.