Are there any books among Project Gutenberg books that haven't already been performed as an audiobook? Assuming that all of the popular books in Project Gutenberg have an audiobook available to purchase read by a human which is probably better quality or at least more likely to be better quality, why would I want to pay money for this instead? I don't see the value proposition here.
I see why you'd think a human-read one would be better, but in my experience that's not the case. It's not that easy to read out loud and actually sound good.
I've spent a fair amount of time listening to free audiobooks (https://archive.org/details/librivoxaudio) including many that are out of copyright like these, as opposed to modern but in the public ___domain.
After listening to a few minutes of "Frankenstein" on his site, I would say that these OpenAI generated voices sound better than almost all of the human-read ones on Librevox, both in audio and performance quality -- these are voices that are designed to sound good, and they succeed at that.
You're right about the popular books, but the long-tail of not-so-popular ones doesn't have a human audio version, and probably will never have.
Plus, sometimes available human narrations are so bad that you really would like to listen to an AI one (I've experienced it with Churchill's audiobooks on Audible).
I don't know if it will work. It felt like it should work, at least for pSEO.
I got my first two audiobook purchases two weeks after I submitted the sitemap to Google. It was some romantic novels. But now it's flatlined again.
