Beyond Audible: Discovering Audiobooks and Other Audio of Interest to Researchers
by David Haden
Audiobooks are a small part of the daily tidal wave that is the release of digital content. Some readers may assume that Audible, Google Play Books, and Spotify are the only discovery tools required. But their popular mass-market approaches may not be what a specialized information seeker needs. Even a commercial library service that’s tracking and offering all university press audiobook editions may lack variety. As such, this article briefly suggests some additional options to consider.
BLINKIST
At first, one might seek out free review sites for audiobooks. But on closer scrutiny, these are affiliates, usually focusing on popular and heavily promoted Audible books. Their supposed reviews can be very short, sometimes consisting solely of the publisher’s blurb. Frankly, it’s difficult to recommend any of them. There seems to be room for a comprehensive review site for audio nonfiction that is both information-rich and listenable. The well-established Blinkist is the closest to this ideal with its 15-minute, human-crafted summaries of 6,500 accessible nonfiction books. These effectively offer part of what a long book review would contain, and audio versions are available.
CHIRP
Categories on the large ecommerce sites are overly broad. It might then seem that affiliates, running niche audiobook sites, would bypass this problem. On closer inspection, these are snapshot subsets of Audible. But Chirp is a nice twist on the niche idea, and it works well. Chirp only adds audiobooks to its search results if they are at bargain-bin prices. It can be filtered for nonfiction, and you own the books chosen (digitally, anyway)—which may make it worth considering.
LIBRIVOX
Don’t overlook LibriVox, despite its shortcomings such as mediocre-quality readings and old source texts. LibriVox offers free readings of public domain titles by volunteers. Not all readers have great voices, but the more pleasing voices can be tracked and sorted by release date. LibriVox’s other problem is more intractable. Project Gutenberg is the source of the texts, thus not the definitive or most modern versions. However, LibriVox can be a delight in terms of discovering obscure or forgotten items. Not all items are out-of-copyright fiction, and there are many history books and some still-valid science books. The site allows dramatic readings with a full cast if required, and snippets from these may be especially useful for some types of online learning packages.
LISTEN NOTES
The comprehensive podcast search engine Listen Notes offers nonfiction adapted into podcast form by independent scholars, which are episodically released as part of its regular podcast. Likewise, it can find long interviews. One of the advantages of Listen Notes is that an MP3 download can usually be found under its More button.
INTERNET ARCHIVE
Many items can be found at the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive also hosts free fan works, such as one of the great audio works of our time: Phil Dragash’s full-cast, unabridged The Lord of the Rings. Again, it may be worth keeping track of the new audio being posted there. The Internet Archive may be especially useful for tracking a locality’s politics. It often stores BBC local news broadcasts from TV and radio after they have become unavailable on the BBC’s website, and it may even have recordings of local authority cabinet meetings. This may also be the case for other regions and nations.
BBC RADIO
Speaking of the BBC, Radio 4’s flagship show In Our Time offers an immensely helpful set of nearly 1,000 structured roundtable audio discussions with experts. It is useful for multidisciplinary writers who need an accessible but authoritative introduction to a complex topic beyond their expertise.
UNIVERSITIES AND ONLINE COURSES
Some large universities host a variety of non-repository audio material aimed at the interested public, with the University of Oxford probably being the largest in the U.K. Such long-form material may not show up in podcast aggregators, still less on Audible. Another source for long-form audio could be online courses, although a subscription may be required.
AI-GENERATED VOICES
There is huge potential to innovate around audiobook formats, and we are only at the start of strong improvements in discovery and integration. All of this may, however, be shaken by new AI-generated voices—not to be confused with older text-to-speech (TTS) voices. For instance, I recently heard an AI-created Stephen Fry, from ElevenLabs, reading The Hobbit. Fry has never read this book aloud, but his AI clone read it with impressive cadence, intonation, and enunciation. There will soon come a time when such things can be crafted locally, on a desktop PC, with easy-to-use software. In the meantime, one especially notable AI voice alternative is DeepZen, which licenses its voice clones from the best professional voice artists.
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