I find those slideshows unintentionally hilarious - ten photos of my kid interspersed with a flash photo of the back of the washing machine and some cable that's hanging down underneath my car, an accidental screen grab of a text message, all treated with the same importance and jaunty library soundtrack.

> But that's the thing...is "perfection" worth 3 hours of video editing for something you casually consume?

Any book of any length took countless hours to write and edit. Yes, I think it's worth a bit of extra time for a human to go through and read the thing aloud.

If the alternative really is no audiobook at all... okay, I guess something is better than nothing. But on the whole, I'd like publishers to just record more audiobooks, and I'm concerned this technology will result in fewer "real" audiobooks being produced.

Agreed. I bought an old Kindle for traveling because I could use its TTS to listen to ebooks. Now that's a common feature of most reader apps, yet at the time it was rare and even newer Kindles had dropped TTS.