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I definitely support your goal: take all the public domain e-books and create audio versions for them. I think the "on-demand" approach is kinda brilliant. Once a book is requested, how long does it take to generate the audio file? Does it happen in one shot?

I sadly found an AI audio project I don't support: This person was instead summarizing popular books into 10 minutes of audio. Basically trying to SEO better than the author and I know the authors aren't compensated. That just left me feeling sad. (I know book summaries for busy people have been a thing for a while, but this just all felt so opportunistic.)

As I search podcasts these days, I'm finding more and more of these low-effort, "doesn't take more than a few minutes to set up, why not" type AI-generated spam cannons. Been hard for a while but it's about to get REALLY hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.

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Right now, I'm splitting all the text into 4,000-character chunks (OpenAI TTS limitation), and converting them into audio "on-demand".

When it's like 1-2 minutes before the end of the current chunk — I'm starting to generate the next one, for a seamless transition.

One chunk is taking about 30-40 seconds to generate (OpenAI API is 20-30s, Azure OpenAI API is ~40s).

I was planning to convert the whole book (just by queuing and parallelizing the requests) and concatenate it into a single MP3 (or an MP3 for each chapter), but it's not ready yet.

I like to watch short movie recaps on youtube instead of the whole things.

I also read summaries of books for research purposes or for dull school homeworks.

They both have a place before or after ai.

Yep, I just listened to a 30min Dune 1 recap on Youtube because I read it years ago but wanted to finally start the second book.

What's the problem?

I think it would be fair IF writers also paid royalties to authors of books in the same genre/subjects they have read.