Now available as an audiobook.

The Dream of Poor Bazin is now available as an audiobook on the Apple Bookstore. This is an experiment on my part, but also on Apple’s as near as I can tell. I had to do no more work than just approving the conversion; the reading was auto-generated by Apple using their artificial voice “Warren”, a “Baritone, American accent: Has characteristics typically associated with masculine voicing.”

Warren sounds like a typical pretentious but soft-spoken journalist of the NPR variety, albeit without the fake Brit accent. I’m not sure this voice would work nearly as well if The Dream of Poor Bazin weren’t a satire about pretentious journalists with delusions of public service.

I have not listened to the entire audiobook. I’ve only listened to the preview. Neither Apple nor Draft2Digital, who Apple is working with for this autogeneration experiment, have given me a free copy. I’m also afraid that if I listened to the book I’d want to re-edit the whole thing based on changes in journalism since I released the paperback in 2020.

I do not have time for that, and I also have a strong conviction that books are books of their time; re-editing them several years later can only diminish them. I can’t imagine re-editing It Isn’t Murder If They’re Yankees, and have put off republishing it for that reason. I immersed myself in a lot of folklore and Southern literature during the process of writing Yankees and I would not even begin to be qualified to edit it today. Even were I to try to replicate that immersion, it would be from a completely different perspective.

“Warren” is obviously a computer, but only barely so. It’s a little more deliberate than I’d like. It pauses at odd points and doesn’t treat commas as a human would, or at least as I would. That said, Warren is not at all robotic. It does a reasonable job of emphasis. It uses sotto voce mostly in the right places. It does not have quite the level of human understanding to know to emphasize “you are a Virginian” more strongly and “you are my son” more affectionately, but it does know that they need a different emphasis than the surrounding text. That alone is impressive.

I don’t generally listen to audiobooks. Books are meant to be read. Much of what The Dream of Poor Bazin riffs off of is specifically written texts, starting from The Three Musketeers and through Mike Royko. To the extent that it also riffs off of audio and visual works, they are audio and visual works that themselves were meant to evoke written works. Stephen’s deliberate emulation of Carl Kolchak’s noirish voiceovers from The Night Stalker movies and television series are a prime example. Stephen is emulating a television character, but that character, Kolchak, was a print journalist, with both feet firmly ensconced in a very hard-boiled cement.

Stephen dresses better.

I do, however, enjoy driving, and I enjoy having both music and spoken words to listen to on those long trips. I have a handful of podcasts that I save up for road trips; most of my road trip content comes from Mark Steyn’s musical digressions. However, I also save up Steyn’s audiobooks for when I run out of topical content.

Warren is nowhere near as good as Mark Steyn. Warren changes its vocal delivery as it should for dialogue, but the computer doesn’t know and, fortunately, doesn’t attempt to try to know, which dialogue belongs to which character. Attempting to give each character a different voice, as Steyn does so well in his readings, would likely be a disaster given the current level of artificial reading and recognition technology.

We’ve gone far beyond Mr. R.I.N.G. but we still have a long way to go before we get to Roy Batty.

You can listen to a preview of the Poor Bazin audiobook on Apple Books, which is also, as far as I can tell, the only place the audiobook is available. Unlike Smashwords, which D2D bought/merged with, Draft2Digital does not appear to sell books, they only distribute them to other booksellers.

The entire reading is fifteen hours. If you listen to it, I’d love to read your reaction to Warren.