Please Fix The Audio: An Action-Oriented Review of the WWOTF Audiobook
Review in a nutshell: The audio version of What We Owe The Future should be rerecorded or at least remastered.
The audio quality is relatively poor (i.e., sounds “fuzzy”).
The audio version has 2.5 out of 5 stars — an immensely low rating — on OverDrive, a platform used by 65,000 libraries and schools.
The audiobook market is huge, and this is a lost opportunity for impact.
There’s existing research on how narratorial styles & sound-quality impact listener buy-in. Someone should collect that research and apply it to future EA audio productions. In lieu of/prior to doing this research, EAs should consider hiring highly-rated voice actors to narrate their books.
Book content: 5/5 Stars. Audio Experience: 2/5 Stars.
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I. Introduction: Loved the content, had issues with the audio — and I’m not the only one
Do I think that the world would be better if What We Owe The Future were widely read? Yes. Do I have minor philosophical quibbles with it? Sure. Do I think enough other reviewers have delved into them already? Absolutely. That’s why I think the most useful review I can give you is one of the audiobook – and to convince you (/Will MacAskill/Future EA Authors) that it needs to be rerecorded. Or at least remastered.
First, it’s not just me. Here’s a comparison of how the audio version vs. written word version of the book is doing on OverDrive, an ebook and audiobook loan service used by over 65,000 libraries and schools.
Importantly, Overdrive is a frequently used platform — and many people are using it to access WWOTF. I asked a few friends to check the waitlists at their OverDrive libraries for the audio version of WWOTF just for a snapshot. The waitlist lengths were: 79 people for 10 copies at the Brooklyn Public Library, 30 people on 10 copies at the North Shore Illinois Library Consortium, 56 people on 7 copies at the New York City Public Library, and 4 people on 1 copy at the Lawrence Kansas Public Library1,2 .
Before moving to the specific issues with the recording, just a few more notes showing I’m not the only one who was challenged by the audio:
At Audible, listeners are able to input star ratings in three categories: ‘performance’, ‘story’, and ‘overall’. At audible.com (vs. audible.co.uk – and I’ll get to why this distinction is important in the next section) there aren’t yet many displayed reviews (n = 26). However, in the six cases where the reviewer didn’t rank the book evenly across all three categories, ‘performance’ was the lowest-starred category three times and the middle category once.
Also, here’s an excerpt from Lorenzo Coopman’s Goodreads review of WWOTF: “First of all, and this is a request for all aspiring authors, don't read your own book aloud; instead, hire a voice actor. There are lots of talented actors out there!”
Lastly, I do want to mention that at a few platforms (generally with low numbers of reviews), the audio version is rated more highly than the written-word book. However, my argument isn’t that the audiobook is better than the written book or vice versa. It’s that the audio book stands to be improved significantly.
A 2.5-star rating on OverDrive is an immensely low ranking. It’s not the ranking What We Owe The Future deserves.
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II. The Audio & Narration Issues
There isn’t a wealth of audiobook-specific reviews available on the internet at this point, but based on a sweep of them plus my own listening experience, here’s what I think the main issues are:
The sound quality is relatively poor throughout the entire recording.
To hear what I mean, here’s a link to a sample of the audio for WWOTF vs. for Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. It sounds “fuzzy”. Others might say “tinny”. Poorer audio quality isn’t highly noticeable to everyone, but it can lead to several issues:
Here’s one example of a study (& a related article) on poor audio quality leading to research being perceived as less credible — and to researchers being perceived less intelligent.
In my own experience (and I think there’s general consensus that) recordings with poorer quality audio are both less fun to listen to and are harder to understand.
Inside my apartment, the sound quality was not a dealbreaker — just made listening to it less enjoyable. In my car (where I usually listen to audiobooks), the added noise of the road/driving to the already below-industry-standard audio quality meant I missed entire sentences of the book. Sidenote: My car has a high-to-medium quality audio system.
A possible solution to all this? Have WWOTF remastered. It might not even be that much (or it might be free). At my journalism school, there was an adjunct faculty member we could take our podcast draft-recordings to — and he’d do magic on them in just a few minutes. There must be someone with EA/Oxford/the publishing company who can fix it — or I can connect you to the adjunct. Or, a (probably) pricier option? MacAskill sounded great on Ezra Klein. They could be asked for help.
As the Goodreads review above alluded to, MacAskill is a brilliant thinker — not a trained voice actor. His intonations are not maximally engaging or evocative. His speech is not maximally clearly enunciated. All this is exacerbated when coupled with the poor audio quality. This isn’t just a comprehension issue — it’s a listener-engagement issue too.
The rate of speaking in the recording is relatively slow and the length of the pauses between sections is irregular.
In terms of speed:
The average of two randomly selected sixty-second samples from WWOTF came in at 130 words per minute.
The average of two randomly selected sixty-second samples from two books on the New York Times Bestseller list came in at 161 words per minute. (The sample from Malcolm Gladwell’s the The Bomber Mafia was 150 words in 60 seconds; The sample from Angela Duckworth’s Grit was 172 words in 60 seconds).
Usually, when listeners prefer faster rates of speech, they have the option to listen to an audiobook at 1.25x speed or above. However, due to the issues listed in the bullets above (and that will be listed below), listening at faster speeds renders the narration increasingly difficult to understand.
I’m not the only one bothered by this. Here’s a review remarking on this issue (and another one in which ‘performance’ is the lowest-ranked category).
Additionally, the length of pauses between sections is irregular. This leads to issues in comprehension — e.g., I wondered: does the pause indicate we’ve hit a new section or is this merely a paragraph break? A few pauses were so lengthy that I checked my phone to see if it had glitched. This is something that could be fixed in a remastering too.
For better and worse, it’s an industry standard to use different readers for different countries/markets: If the highest goal for WWOTF is impact, audio in a different accent may lead to higher listening comprehension & reader-engagement in North America.
It’s a small sample, but if you take a quick look at the audible reviews when sorted by .com vs. .co.uk, you see that none of the UK reviews have “performance” marked lower than any of the other rankings. As mentioned above, this was not the case with the US reviews, where performance — if a category was to lag behind — ranked lower.
Poor audio quality, coupled with complex subject matter, coupled with an accent that’s unfamiliar to many groups leads to a narrated book being much more difficult to process. Everyone has an accent — and understanding accents different from one’s own is a learned skill. Many Americans don’t have the opportunity to practice this skill — and can’t understand Americans from other regions. Most Americans are even less practiced at listening to Scottish accents.
User testing could determine whether accent is still an issue once audio quality is corrected.
III. A few additional thoughts — the nature of the audio market
Audiobook listeners are a large portion of those who pick up WWOTF. Audio is a huge market: audiobook sales outpaced ebook sales recently. Additionally, based on surveys investigating when people listen to audiobooks, it seems many listeners select recorded books for situations when reading is not an option (e.g., in the car, while doing housework). It feels pretty safe to assume — for a majority of listeners — that if a listener dislikes an audiobook, they will have no time or inclination to read the written book instead.
IV. Action-oriented conclusion & next steps
Audio matters. It’s why podcasters and politicians and celebrities spend extreme amounts of money on audio production, tech, staff, and research. It’s time for EA to step up its game here.
This is why I went into extreme detail in this review: I wanted to go beyond ‘the audio quality was poor & the narration could be improved.’ I felt like that made the point but didn’t illustrate it. EA is at a place where audio isn’t a six-of-one, half-a-dozen situation anymore. There was an incredible amount of press for WWOTF. If the movement keeps going the way it is there will be increasingly more book releases — and if people are invested enough to read a full book on Effective Altruism, it’s a prime time to impact them. Losing them via poor audio seems like a wasted opportunity.
With regards to WWOTF specifically, MacAskill wrote it because he believed it had the potential for impact. Its audio version is a barrier to that impact: its quality seems likely to result in unnecessarily high listener drop-off, fewer people recommending WWOTF, and fewer people picking up the book in the first place due to its low ratings on platforms that do not aggregate audio and written rankings3.
Here are some other steps I think make sense, shorter to longer term:
Shorter-term: Consider remastering and/or rerecording WWOTF.
Commonsense Midterm: Hire really great voice actors (who are highly rated) to narrate EA books.
Longer-term: There’s a great deal of research on how sound-quality and narratorial style impact listener buy-in. Have someone gather that research and apply it to future EA audio productions
This is a book that deserves great audio. Future EA books deserve great audio too.
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Additionally, to double-check that a somewhat significant number or library patrons had rated the book, I rated it myself (5 stars!). My rating at least did not budge the overall star count — as it would have on, say, Google Play, where there are currently only 5 reviews.
You may say, well, maybe audio users are just more persnickety than written-word readers. I don’t have time to do an analysis of that, but I will say that Doing Good Better (read by Sean Pratt, who does not seem like an especially in-demand voice actor given the other titles he’s recorded) was rated at 3.5 (audio) vs. 4 stars (written). Additionally, for the first three random titles I picked: Outliers is 4.5 and 4.5; Lord of the Rings is 4.5 and 4.5; and The Precipice is 4.5 and 4.5.
For example, Amazon combines audio + written text ratings & reviews. Most other platforms that I’m aware of keep them separated.