Needs Assessment

Audiobooks have gained increasing popularity with the advent of services like Audible. From 2011 to 2018, the share of adults who have listened to an audiobook in the last 12 months have increased from 11 to 18 percent.

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However, creating audiobooks can be prohibitively expensive for some smaller publications. Human read audiobooks costs around 250 per hour at least1, according to ACX’s guidelines, a popular audiobook making marketplace.

Most audiobooks run for approximately 10 hours of audio, so that makes for $25002, excluding any additional costs in royalties, etc.

There are many books, including older obscure books, low print publications, books from new and relatively unknown authors which never got an audiobook release. Not to mention, many people already own physical copies of books which they would want to enjoy as audiobooks without the additional expense.

That is why we have set out to develop a product to reliably convert physical books into a high-quality automated audiobook. The product must be able to take a physical copy of a fiction book and read out the words in a natural and dramatic manner (as opposed to conversational).

  1. ACX help article help.acx.com/s/article/what-rate-should-a-producer-charge ↩

  2. Kobo help article https://help.kobo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018108913-Audiobook-file-sizes ↩