Podium Entertainment, the audiobook publisher behind some of the genre’s biggest current hits, has been sold to private equity firms Flexpoint Ford and Shamrock Capital in a deal the Wall Street Journal reports at more than $400 million.
"Amazon has spent the past year building the exact technology that makes a company like Podium look less essential to produce audiobooks in the first place. Audible rolled out AI narration in 2025 with more than 100 AI-generated voices"
I don't think this is a good understanding of the audiobook market. JDA is a book guy, not an audiobook guy, so he fails to understand just how bad AI narration still is. There is even a large number of listeners who follow narrators and not authors, who will listen to whatever Simon Vance or RC Bray read to them.
“Once the AI is good enough, …”, you say. Wake me up when that happens and I'll stop buying audiobooks altogether, because I'll just convert it in my own machine. But, I'll be sleeping for years and years while engineers figure that out.
AI voice is good enough for short durations, maskable with low audio quality, and better-than-nothing for accessibility. None of those apply when I want to listen to the latest Nick Cole yarn on my commute.
Now that Private Equity owns it, it can begin its march towards awfulness, just like every chain restaurant.
Or Hospital
Why do banks loan money to firms that were just bought by private equity? Don't they know by now that it's going to go bankrupt?
I have been listening to audio book versions of books by you and by Vox Day. I find the quality of these A.I. books to be superb.
Yeah, the only AI narrated book I’ve read was by Vox Day and it was surprisingly good
"I am become Private Equity, destroyer of businesses."
Vampire Equity
I've listened to a few AI-generated audio narrators. Never again.
"Amazon has spent the past year building the exact technology that makes a company like Podium look less essential to produce audiobooks in the first place. Audible rolled out AI narration in 2025 with more than 100 AI-generated voices"
I don't think this is a good understanding of the audiobook market. JDA is a book guy, not an audiobook guy, so he fails to understand just how bad AI narration still is. There is even a large number of listeners who follow narrators and not authors, who will listen to whatever Simon Vance or RC Bray read to them.
“Once the AI is good enough, …”, you say. Wake me up when that happens and I'll stop buying audiobooks altogether, because I'll just convert it in my own machine. But, I'll be sleeping for years and years while engineers figure that out.
AI voice is good enough for short durations, maskable with low audio quality, and better-than-nothing for accessibility. None of those apply when I want to listen to the latest Nick Cole yarn on my commute.