<story><title>State of the Sanderson 2022</title><url>https://www.brandonsanderson.com/state-of-the-sanderson-2022/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>galangalalgol</author><text>I still remember when the kindle first came out, it would read to you. Before publishers threatened to sue. With modern text to speech getting so good, there really is no reason an inference model couldn&amp;#x27;t run on every device to read to us.  I guess book readers were the first to have their jobs replaced by AI, but contracts didn&amp;#x27;t let it happen.</text></item><item><author>optymizer</author><text>I worked for a few years at Audible as a dev. Based on my experience, I&amp;#x27;d say the culture at the company was good, in that we were not trying to exploit people, neither externally nor internally.&lt;p&gt;One thing that was pretty clear was that our audiobooks were at the mercy of publishing houses &amp;#x2F; content owners, and a lot of restrictions came from licensing deals (geographic reastrictions, time-based, formats, etc), so I&amp;#x27;m inclined to assume that the low cut for authors may be due to publishers wanting a big cut of the sales.&lt;p&gt;That said, there was a floor which we were not allowed on, and I believe that was the sales floor, so there could have been a whole other side to this company that I was not exposed to.</text></item><item><author>montenegrohugo</author><text>This is the stuff I love. Sanderson doesn&amp;#x27;t _have_ to take a stand against Audible , and yet he does. Of course he is in a position of privilege to be able to do it, but so many other people are too and act very differently.&lt;p&gt;Audible giving creators only a 25% cut (or 40% if they sign an exclusive deal) is absolutely exploitative. For a DIGITAL product! That&amp;#x27;s insane.&lt;p&gt;Props to Sanderson, and props to all the other people with integrity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>irrational</author><text>I don’t know. I’ve been listening to an unabridged audiobook of the Count of Monte Cristo. The single narrator has done a fantastic job of giving a different voice to every single character. Even if a particular character hasn’t appeared for tens of hours, when they do reappear, I remember who they are from their unique voice.&lt;p&gt;Plus, the narrator does a great job of pronouncing names with a french accent (at least, it sounds legit to me, a non-french speaking person). I wonder how a computer voice would do with speaking English with a distinct French accent. Would it understand when to go more heavily English vs French?</text></comment>
<story><title>State of the Sanderson 2022</title><url>https://www.brandonsanderson.com/state-of-the-sanderson-2022/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>galangalalgol</author><text>I still remember when the kindle first came out, it would read to you. Before publishers threatened to sue. With modern text to speech getting so good, there really is no reason an inference model couldn&amp;#x27;t run on every device to read to us.  I guess book readers were the first to have their jobs replaced by AI, but contracts didn&amp;#x27;t let it happen.</text></item><item><author>optymizer</author><text>I worked for a few years at Audible as a dev. Based on my experience, I&amp;#x27;d say the culture at the company was good, in that we were not trying to exploit people, neither externally nor internally.&lt;p&gt;One thing that was pretty clear was that our audiobooks were at the mercy of publishing houses &amp;#x2F; content owners, and a lot of restrictions came from licensing deals (geographic reastrictions, time-based, formats, etc), so I&amp;#x27;m inclined to assume that the low cut for authors may be due to publishers wanting a big cut of the sales.&lt;p&gt;That said, there was a floor which we were not allowed on, and I believe that was the sales floor, so there could have been a whole other side to this company that I was not exposed to.</text></item><item><author>montenegrohugo</author><text>This is the stuff I love. Sanderson doesn&amp;#x27;t _have_ to take a stand against Audible , and yet he does. Of course he is in a position of privilege to be able to do it, but so many other people are too and act very differently.&lt;p&gt;Audible giving creators only a 25% cut (or 40% if they sign an exclusive deal) is absolutely exploitative. For a DIGITAL product! That&amp;#x27;s insane.&lt;p&gt;Props to Sanderson, and props to all the other people with integrity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mindvirus</author><text>It wasn&amp;#x27;t publishers, it was the Author&amp;#x27;s Guild, the union representing voice talent for audiobooks. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.google.com&amp;#x2F;amp&amp;#x2F;s&amp;#x2F;amp.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;technology&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2009&amp;#x2F;mar&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;authors-guild-blocks-kindle-voice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.google.com&amp;#x2F;amp&amp;#x2F;s&amp;#x2F;amp.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;technology&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>