The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[issybird]

OK, this vent is about audiobooks, specifically about Audible. For those who don’t consider listening to be reading, neither do I, but this is the best fit.

I’ve got to use up three credits from Audible, not immediately as I paused my membership a while back, but soon enough that I need to start thinking about it. It’s just so danged hard! It’s not as if there aren’t books I want to read, but sometimes I only want to read them. And, most importantly, I never buy what I can borrow and things I like to listen to, such as Victorian novels and mysteries, are readily available at libraries.

So once I’ve checked my wishlist for books I want to buy that I’d be happy to listen to and come up with nothing, what to do? And here’s where the rant comes in. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that filtering by category, especially of recent releases and coming soon would result in a plethora of options. Hahahahaha. Because here’s the thing: I only want trad-pubbed books read by professional narrators. No virtual voice, thankyouverymuch. And no AI-generated books. And as far as I can tell, there’s no way to exclude them. It’s like looking for something decent to read at KU. The occasional gem is lost in a sea of dreck.

And, a corollary rant: Trad-pubbed for me extends to public domain, but the same public domain books keep getting new narrators. Some Dickens novels must have eight or ten narrators by now. Stop that! Dig deeper into the vast realm of near-classics that haven’t been narrated yet!

Sigh. This time, once I extract myself, I’m done. I don’t care what kind of deal Audible offers, it’s not worth the tsuris. I can find enough to listen to at OverDrive and Hoopla.

[Witty Username]

Have you considered radio drama with full cast rather than narrated books? I get a lot of BBC radio dramas from audible uk, I checked and they are also on audible.com

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by issybird

…
So once I’ve checked my wishlist for books I want to buy that I’d be happy to listen to and come up with nothing, what to do? And here’s where the rant comes in. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that filtering by category, especially of recent releases and coming soon would result in a plethora of options. Hahahahaha. Because here’s the thing: I only want trad-pubbed books read by professional narrators. No virtual voice, thankyouverymuch. And no AI-generated books. And as far as I can tell, there’s no way to exclude them. It’s like looking for something decent to read at KU. The occasional gem is lost in a sea of dreck.
…

It's crazy that it's easier to search Amazon with Qwant, DuckDuckGo, or Google than on Amazon. Their search is now almost useless.

Also with "Wish Lists" of 3 different genres of solely Kindle ebooks the "order by price" is broken.

And if on Search you dare to change the stupid default "Featured" to "Price" (low to high or vice versa) most of the results vanish.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Witty Username

Have you considered radio drama with full cast rather than narrated books? I get a lot of BBC radio dramas from audible uk, I checked and they are also on audible.com

Thank you for that suggestion! Occasionally I listen to old-time radio dramas which have a retro appeal, but dramas done to current tastes would have more heft!

There's still, alas, the issue of actually finding them amid the dross that Audible is promoting these days....

Harking back to my comment on virtual voice, it's not that I won't. In fact, I let Alexa read Kindle books to me frequently. But I'm not going to pay for it.

[DNSB]

Speaking of Audible, I just checked with Audible again about using Audible books on a Kindle ereader. Sadly Audible Canada's response was pretty much word for word the same message they've used every year since the last time I asked.

Although, Audible is a subsidiary of Amazon, however they operate separately.

At this time, Kindle is not compatible with our Audible.ca software. We are always looking to expand our compatible devices catalog but since an extensive technical testing is required to perfect the final platform it may take a bit longer then expected to release a supported platform.

Oddly, that while Audible USA seems to have solved those issues years back, Audible Canada has not managed to either solve the problems themselves or rebrand Audible USA's solution.

[j.p.s]

L.A. Theatre Works has a collection of over 600 audio works available by podcast or streaming. I was in the LA area a lot for work a bit over 20 years ago and listened to their weekly broadcast when I was in town on its scheduled night. I liked it a lot, but its never been on air in my area and I never got around to hunting down the podcast and I don't do audio streaming.

The streaming subscription is $10/month with a 7 day free trial. I vaguely recall that some of the works are multi-part and thus longer than the hour or two broadcast slot, but I'm not certain. Presumably a complete list of works is "readily" available. I'm pretty the works date from over 100 years ago to very recent.

[Apache]

I hate Audible's search engine. You do a search, and they say there are over 5000 books in the category. Yet you can only search the first 500. If you choose to show 50 books per page the most pages they give is 10.
Apache