Welcome
to the Future - Maybe!
Ever since the inception of Sci Fi - Arizona, people have asked me
if I sold Audio Books. The short answer has always been 'no.'
The reason for this has been the cost of producing them. To do
a good audio book requires that you hire an actor, or at least
someone with a trained voice, to read your book and then produce the
necessary audio files. Since it takes approximately 12 hours
to read a book aloud, the cost is exorbitant, especially if you have
12 books for them to read.
Recently, one of my customers emailed to tell me that he was
converting my books to audio using the new MacIntosh operating
system voice and that it came out pretty good. Not as good as
a professional actor, of course; but much better than computer
voices that have heretofore been available. Intrigued, I tried
it. Being of the other 'religion' (PC), I looked online and
found the new Natural Voices -- VW Paul and VW Kate. Sure
enough, they are much better than any computer voice I'd previously
listened to. They ought to be. Each voice requires 500
megabytes of software to synthesize it.
So, as an experiment, I formatted both
Gibraltar Earth and
Gibraltar Sun for audio and used a Text-to-Speech program
to convert them into MP3 files. To my surprise, they came out
sounding pretty good, and indeed, better than they sound when I read
them aloud.
They do not, however, come out sounding completely human.
While the pronunciation of the new voices is much less robot-like
than their predecessors, being a computer, the machine does not have
as natural an intonation or rhythm as a human being. It does
have better breath control, however; at least better than someone
such as myself with an untrained voice. After listening to
them, I found it a little like listening to a narrator with an
accent. Fairly quickly, the brain adjusts and the story comes
through loud and clear.
So, as an experiment, I am now offering audio books of the Gibraltar
Series read by Natural Voice VW Paul. If you are an audio book
enthusiast, you may want to give them a try. Just download our
sample file first so that you can listen to "Paul" read an excerpt
from one of the books and see if you agree that this is an
acceptable method for producing audio books. It isn't the
best method obviously. However, it is currently the
only method that makes the project economically viable.
The books are formatted in a series of MP3 files of approximately
one hour playing time, with 10-12 files per book. When you
order through our shopping cart, you will get an electronic download
of the PDF-formatted instruction sheet that gives you the location
and password for the directories where the books are stored.
You then have two choices for downloading. You can download
each of the one-hour files (not encrypted) one at a time to your
hard drive. In tests, they take about two minutes each on a
high speed INTERNET connection. You can also download the
self-extracting compressed file of the complete book. If you
choose to do this, you probably want to run some sort of download
manager program. FlashGet (
http://www.flashget.com/download.htm)
offers a good freeware download manager that can substantially
reduce the time it takes to download very large files.
Caution: Audio book files require on the order of 375 megabytes
total storage space on your computer for each book. Because
these are high quality recordings, they take up a lot of room.
The books are priced lower than those in bookstores. I have
set the price at $1.00 per hour of entertainment.
Note: I have received input from the
first customers who purchased GIBRALTAR EARTH in audio book format.
One of the customers said that it took him about an hour to get used
to the computer-generated voice. After that, he had no
difficulty listening to the story. His opinion is validated by
the fact that I received these comments as he was purchasing another
copy of GIBRALTAR EARTH for a friend and GIBRALTAR SUN for himself.
As this is an experiment, please let me know what you think.
Copyright 1997-2008 by Sci Fi - Arizona, Inc.
Sci Fi - Arizona, Inc.
PO Box 14026
Tempe, AZ 85284-0068
