We have a lot to talk about this week. There's been a lot of stories for January. Yeah, December was busy.

January is busy.

Who would have funk it?

First up is a story we did not get to last week, which is Apple Books,

and a new artificial intelligence way of producing audio books for books that would

otherwise never have had audio book versions of what's that story Mayo?

Yeah that's certainly the way that Apple was trying to present it. It's a new scheme

that Apple is announced towards the end of last year and now the first books are actually

available to download from the Apple bookstorestore that are, as you say, narrated by AI rather than humans.

So this applies to audio book production.

Apple Books is basically trying to get more audio books on their platform and

especially for smaller writers and independence the cost of getting a

human-made audio book recording, you know, produced, edited, compiled together is quite

expensive. It can be upwards of $5,000 for an average novel and most independent writers can't afford that so a lot of books on

the store just go without audio book versions but with this push to get more audio books

and platform one way they found that they can increase the quantity is by relying on artificial intelligence to basically

synthesizers the audio for them. And there's a few little interesting details here, so the relationship has nothing to do with Apple really.

Like it's not a thing where Apple is handling the production staff or Apple is dictating rules and terms.

They're quite open and free.

They're like, you, they're not,

they're not converting all the books to audio books

on your behalf or anything.

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