In an effort to de-Bezos myself, I canceled my Audible subscription and switched over to libro.fm. It doesn’t have nearly the same depth of catalogue as Audible, but they only sell DRM-free audiobooks AND you can nominate a bookshop to support, so a portion of every purchase I make goes towards a local Irish children’s bookshop. Nice!

The other night, I saw they were selling what they claimed was The Iliad translated by Emily Wilson and I bought it immediately, despite the fact there were a lot of things that really should have made me suspicious:

1. The terrible cover art that doesn’t even mention Emily Wilson
2. The author, “Nathan Brooks”, has mainly only narrated Keto diet books (we’ll come back to Devolution and Meister der Angst)

From the first line, it was obvious this was not the Emily Wilson translation. This was the public-domain, hundred-year-old (and fairly trash) Lang, Leaf and Myers translation. Yikes!

But I also started to suspect this was AI narration. A painfully flat affect, unnatural intonations, and two completely different pronunciations of “Atreides” (a name that, incidentally, doesn’t even appear in the Wilson translation). Every line ends in a semi-questionmark which is a trick used by stochastic parrots to gain some wiggle-room and maybe make it sound like they understand the meaning of the words they’re saying. This illusion works reasonably well in short bursts, but they were trying to do it across a 15 hour book?

Paradox Audios

I started looking into the publisher, “Paradox Audios”. Libro.fm are selling at least nine books from this publisher. And they all have a few things in common.

1. These are all public domain works
2. The narrator has never narrated anything before
3. All published between February and March 2025
4. The bland, formulaic artwork.
5. Over-thesaurus’d summaries/descriptions with the adjective dial turned all the way up

Take a listen to the sample of "Door in the Wall" narrated by “Samuel Grant”. Now listen to "The Canon of Sherlock Holmes" narrated by “Thomas Jenkins”. That is the exact same voice. Also, Thomas Jenkins has never narrated anything before, and the first book he’s reading is a 65 hour epic? Not a chance.

Any one of these is fishy enough, but all together, it’s obvious this “publisher” is clearly someone who is just churning out AI slop and selling it to audiobook sellers. And it’s kind of working! As of writing (2025-04-19), their versio of The Iliad is #4 in Libro.fm’s list of bestsellers in the “Poetry” category, behind Ian Mackellen reading The Odyssey but ahead of Stephen Fry’s Troy (read by Stephen Fry).

Libro’s response to AI

In a thoughtful blog post published in October last year, Libro addressed the issue of AI narration. They said:

We are actively taking steps to increase transparency around audiobooks that are AI-narrated by properly labeling them on our site and in our apps. As an audiobook retailer and app, we are not involved in the production AI-narrated audiobooks; so labelling them requires collaboration with our publishing partners.

Which is fair enough, I think!

And in their defence, I wrote to them to let them know my issues with the version of The Iliad I had purchased and they immediately issued a refund and said they’d shared my email with their content team and they’d be looking into the books from Paradox Audios.

Not just Libro.fm

But it’s not just Libro.fm. Kobo also has the Paradox Audios version of The Iliad. So does Apple Books. Do you know who doesn’t have it? Audible. (Probably because they locked down exclusive rights to the actual Wilson translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey).

What it feels like, to me, is that in order to compete with Audible, the other audiobook sellers are turning to these no-name, unscrupulous publishers to bulk out their catalogue. And it’s making their product worse.

So short-sighted. I really do want to support independent booksellers as best I can, and I would much rather Libro just say “Yeah we don’t have it”, rather serving up this dreadful slop.

Libro’s awful “Narrator” search

Since I’m on the subject of Libro.fm, I just wanted to touch on something I mentioned earlier. Remember I talked about the other books coming up when you search for Nathan Brooks as a narrator? Rather than giving each narrator a unique ID and attaching that to the credit, Libro do a fuzzy search. So not only is the AI “Nathan Brooks” from The Iliad NOT the same as the one that read those Keto books (one is English, the other American), books like Meister der Angst also turn up in the search results. These are books with a whole cast of narrators and we’re matching partial names. In this case, “David Nathan” and “Farina Brock”. Not even close! But it makes these sketchy narrators look more legit, at least from a cursory glance.

Note: I’m going to do my best not to spoil Blue Prince but it’s a hard one to talk around and everyone has a different tolerance for spoilers. If you feel like I’m giving too much away, let me know!

I spent the weekend playing Blue Prince with my kids. And they seem to be enjoying it? They’ve gotten into videogames recently but rarely stray outside of the standard kid’s fare like Minecraft and Mario Kart. I think they like the fact that Blue Prince is cozy and slightly cerebral, even if they don’t quite understand all of the things that are happening or why I might draft one room over another. But in the game, each room is a puzzle or a layer to a puzzle and I love hearing them theorise what each element of the room might be.

(Incidentally, they’ve occasionally been really helpful. There’s a picture on a wall that I just couldn’t figure out. For hours, I kept thinking “Is that Donald Trump??”. And my daughter copped it first time. I’d still be bashing my head against it if it wasn’t for her).

Playing it yesterday with my 7-year-old beside me and I reached a room with a load of things in it that I didn’t understand. “I’m not sure what these are but I’ll bet they’re important”, I said to him. So I grabbed screenshots of all the things, and asked him what he thought they were. And so we came up with a little story of what they were, and then moved onto another thing.

A couple of runs later, we were doing something else in the game and came to a whole new area I’d never visited before. As I was looking around, getting an idea of what I was looking at and I said “does this look kinda familiar?”. And at the exact same time, we both came to the realisation that these were the things we’d been looking at just an hour ago and that I’d screenshotted. The delight on his little face as he realised he’d worked it out was spectacular.

(The other take-away from this is that I have the same mental capabilities of a 7-year-old but let’s just skip over that for now.)

Anyway, Blue Prince is a really great game. But even better if you can play it as a multiplayer experience with two little buddies.