If I had to make an audiobook from scratch, I would have never ventured into it." “I had these CDs in my father’s voice ready, so I didn’t have any production costs. “If there’s a customer for Tamil audiobooks out there, all of us will cater to them, but the sales are just not high enough to make a profit," says Gandhi Kannadasan, owner, Kannadasan Pathippagam, a small, Chennai-based Tamil book publisher who has taken a tentative step with audiobooks online by introducing audio CDs of Tamil poet Kannadasan, who also happens to be his father. Yet as an industry average, audiobook sales are usually just 10-15% of print book sales, says Zende. For BooksTALK, the cost is about ₹ 60,000, including voice artiste costs, studio hiring, editing, production, designing and background music. Karadi Tales spends up to ₹ 2 lakh on creating one audiobook. The theme of telling a story runs so deep that Karadi Tales puts background scores in audiobooks even though that makes production costlier.
“The advantage of working with well-known actors is that they come with the experience of using their voices theatrically and creatively," explains Manasi Subramaniam, commissioning editor, Karadi Tales Company. Karadi Tales Company, one of the earliest publishers in India to venture into the commercial audiobook space for children, has created a niche in the industry by bringing in actors, film directors and lyricists, such as Naseeruddin Shah, Nandita Das, Shekhar Kapur, Vidya Balan, Boman Irani and Gulzar. Both are unsuitable for a book," says Zende, who prefers theatre artistes as narrators. “Voice artistes have two types of voices, either bubbly happy or a corporate style of speaking. BooksTALK chooses its storytellers carefully, and shuns voice artistes. Voice intonation, according to most publishers, is very important to make a good quality audiobook. “Have you ever heard a text-to-speech? It’s boring with a capital B," says Zende, “Audiobooks have to be narrated interestingly, else a listener will be distracted or bored and switch it off." The reason is that people get completely turned off by the mechanical sound.
TAMIL AUDIO BOOKS MP3 FREE DOWNLOAD SOFTWARE
But though it’s free and offers instantaneous results, this software is not used by audiobook makers. For a commercial publisher like BooksTALK or NHM, converting a 200-page book into a master CD of an audiobook takes about four weeks, which includes studio recording, editing, designing and printing.Ī quicker option is using a text-to-speech or TTS software, something like Dhvani, which can auto-read Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. Since its inception in 2008, Vartak has uploaded only 14 audiobooks on his blog BoltiPustake.Įven this number is an achievement if you consider that a 400-page book takes at least 200 days to record and edit before it can be uploaded. One reason is that it takes a lot of time to make one. Fiction sells less," says Badri Seshadri, publisher and managing director, NHM.Įven though most regional publishers in languages ranging from Marathi, Oriya, Bengali and Hindi to Tamil, Kannada and others are considering and trying out the audiobook space, the number of books in the market remains low. These listeners prefer non-fiction titles such as biographies, political histories, self-improvement and history. “It is the people who do not like to read much but like to know things that go for these titles. It sells CDs through its website for ₹ 99-199 and on Audible for approximately $10 (or ₹ 555) each on a revenue-sharing basis. Ltd (NHM), established in 2004, is one of the earliest ventures in audiobooks in Tamil and has uploaded over 100 audiobooks in the language since 2006. “While in Kannada and Bengali audiobooks we stick to classics only, in English we are bringing out all kinds of titles, non-fiction, classics, fiction etc.," says Zende.
Just listen", BooksTALK aims to introduce about 100 audiobooks in three languages-English, Kannada and Bengali-in the market by year-end. With a funky website and a subhead “Story telling is back.
“Even today if you go to a music shop you can pick up Katha audiobooks on CDs," he says. “We have a rich tradition of oral storytelling in all languages in India and have been a listening culture historically." Zende remembers how he grew up hearing audiobooks on cassettes, narrated on Bombay Doordarshan and then some years later, on CDs. “This whole narration business is nothing new in India," says Jai Madhukar Zende, co-founder, BooksTALK, an year-old audiobook publisher.