i thought that one reason books has low bit rates, compared to music, is that you don't need to capture full frequency range, just the part that a human male, or female voice occupies. [ same principle applied to land line telephone design ]
then you can safely compress the hell out of it with mp3 or AAC because we know that only a few audiophiles/ recording engineers can distinguish good mp3 compression from lossless , and that they only do it by intensely focusing on esoteric stuff like how the sound of cymbals decays.
so no pair of golden ears is going to detect "slightly" vs "minimally" compressed spoken voice vs uncompressed
this had to be a mix of hardening DRM under some marketing spin about larger files sound better. [ its bigger so we charge you a lot more because y'know - quality - and you are too dumb to spot the scam ]
as another compare - do you happen you know how BBC go about broadcasting a radio play/ making that available on i-player?
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