Star Trek Audiobooks!!!! - oh wait....

[Smitty]

So I happened into Audible today and just thought I would search for unabridged Star Trek Audio books and it returned 28 hits! With much excitement and trembling fingers I started scrolling through the list. I first see the movie novelizations and a couple of others I had seen before.

Then I start seeing Titan and Destiny and Vanguard books and my heart starts racing . I reach for my wallet because I do not have that many credit with which to buy them all! But as I look closer something is amiss. Some of the covers exclaim "exklusiv" and the narrators are name I have never seen before and even the titles are something I cannot read . My heart begins to sink. I choose one and hit the sample button and out from the speaker pours forth narration in a language I cannot understand, german maybe?

I am crushed, I slide my wallet back into my pocket and facepalm once more....


Oh how I wish we could get full unabridged versions of modern star trek books.....

 

[Christopher]

You can't really appreciate Star Trek until you've heard it in the original Klingon...

 

[Extrocomp]

I don't understand why there aren't more Star Trek audiobooks. Surely the Star Trek franchise is popular enough to sustain a huge audiobook market.

 

[ATimson]

I don't understand why there aren't more Star Trek audiobooks. Surely the Star Trek franchise is popular enough to sustain a huge audiobook market.

If it was that popular, they wouldn't have cut the line in half, or stopped releasing books in the more prestigious TPB and hardcover formats.

 

[Idran]

What is it, something like 1% of even the core Trek fanbase read Trek books to begin with? (Not even of the general audience, but of the core fanbase.) And then you'd cut that again by at least a tenth for audiobooks, probably even less than that.

I don't know if asking for specific numbers is gauche, but for the authors here, just to get some perspective: what's a ballpark for the number of units sold for a Trek book that's considered by Pocket to be successful in the present-day market? I'd guess high five digits, something like 60-75,000? Maybe low six digits? (Though maybe I'm way undershooting; no insult intended if I am, I'm just going based on numbers I've heard for similar things.)

 

[Extrocomp]

The vast majority of Dungeons & Dragons novels have been released as audiobooks. Isn't Star Trek a much more popular franchise than D&D?

 

[Idran]

The vast majority of Dungeons & Dragons novels have been released as audiobooks. Isn't Star Trek a much more popular franchise than D&D?

Star Trek as a whole is more popular than D&D, but as far as I know Star Trek novels are less popular than D&D.

 

[KRAD]

The problem is a spectacular case of bad timing. The Trek audio books were discontinued due to declining sales many years ago -- back when the form audio books took was CDs and tapes. By the time the MP3 revolution occurred and all audio books were released digitally (and there was an overall huge spike in audio overall), S&S Audio had already long since given up on Trek audio.

 

[Jeri]

You may be able to make your own. I must do that since I'm dyslexic, and the federal talking book program doesn't have all the titles I want. I cut up the books, run the pages through a feeder scanner ten pages at a time, convert to sound files in iTunes and away I go.

I use a conversion program my husband made about 20 years ago for Mac, updating with new operating systems as they come out. He's a software developer. But by now there must be some program out there for this purpose.

I hope I didn't upset anyone saying I cut up the books; the first time I did it, I had to go lie down in a dark room. ;-) But if the choice is not reading or cutting them up, I'll gladly cut them up. It's a slippery slope. I have lots of cut-up books in plastic bags on my book shelves.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Oh how I wish we could get full unabridged versions of modern star trek books.....

Trek audios were quite popular in the early days, but at the time of cassette tapes as the medium, unabridged versions were simply not cost effective.
http://therinofandor.blogspot.com.au/2007/05/i-hear-star-trek.html

Simon & Schuster Audioworks' unabridged audios:

"Star Trek" by Alan Dean Foster, read by Zachary Quinto, 2009, approx. 480 min.

"Sarek" by AC Crispin, read by Nick Sullivan, 2012 (Re-release of 2001 Chivers/BBC version, now by S & S Audio via Audible Frontiers download), approx. 879 min.

"Star Trek Into Darkness" by Alan Dean Foster, read by Alice Eve, 2013, approx. 535 min.

Other unabridged audios:

"The Physics of Star Trek" by Lawrence M. Krauss, read by Larry McKeever, Books on Tape, 1996, approx 390 min.

"Sarek" by AC Crispin, read by Nick Sullivan, Chivers Sound Library/BBC Audiobooks America, 2001 (Re-released: Audible Frontiers download, 2012), approx. 879 min.

"Star Trek Nemesis" by J.M. Dillard, read by Grover Gardner, Chivers Sound Library/BBC Audiobooks America, 2002, 347 min.

"Vulcan's Soul, Book 1: Exodus" by Josepha Sherman and Susan Shwartz, read by Richard Poe, Recorded Books, 2004, 510 min.

"Vulcan's Soul, Book 2: Exiles" by Josepha Sherman and Susan Shwartz, read by Richard Poe, Recorded Books, 2006, 630 min.

"Vulcan's Soul, Book 3: Epiphany" by Josepha Sherman and Susan Shwartz, read by Richard Poe, Recorded Books, 2007, 694 min.

As of October 2012, German language audios included (list supplied by Defcon):

Audible.de
Titan:
Eine neue Ära (Taking Wing)
Der rote König (The Red King)
Die Hunde des Orion (Orion's Hounds)
Schwert des Damokles (Sword of Damocles)
Stürmische See (Over a torrent Sea)
Synthese (Synthesis)

All read by Detlef Bierstedt, who was the German voice of Riker during TNG and "Generations".

Vanguard:
Der Vorbote (Harbinger)
Rufe den Donner (Summon the Thunder)
Ernte den Sturm (Reap the Whirlwind)
Offene Geheimnisse (Open Secrets)
Vor dem Fall (Precipice)
Enthüllungen (Declassified)

All read by Dietmar Wunder, the German voice of Daniel Craig's James Bond character.

Destiny:
Götter der Nacht (Gods of Night)
Gewöhnliche Sterbliche (Mere Mortals)
Verlorene Seelen (Lost Souls)

Read by Lutz Riedel, who was the dubbing director for the TNG movies.

 

[Idran]

You may be able to make your own. I must do that since I'm dyslexic, and the federal talking book program doesn't have all the titles I want. I cut up the books, run the pages through a feeder scanner ten pages at a time, convert to sound files in iTunes and away I go.

How do you cut them up, out of curiosity? Do you have to go through by hand page-by-page, or is there a machine that you can just put the book in and it cuts each one individually? Or do you just slice the spine off with an electric knife or something?

 

[Jeri]

Idran, I just use a box cutter; cut off the cover, start slicing the spine, pages come off in chunks, and I separate them one by one. It doesn't take that long, and I can always listen to a Trek book while I do it. Time and effort well spent; I keep them all in iTunes or archived.

I've listened to my Kirsten Beyer's series a couple of times. Currently I just began working through TOS numbered novels, some of which I read decades ago before vision problems and which are full of fond memories. Most recently I digitized the Into Darkness novelization; it was available in audio format, but I find my own versions quicker and easier to listen to.

 

[Idran]

How natural is the voice? Does it work pretty well, or does it ever take you out of things? Given the kind of books we're talking about, I'd think it'd stumble on some odder-spelled words/names/what have you pretty often, but is it pretty good about that sort of thing?

Sorry for the questions, I'm just really interested in this since somehow I never really thought about this as a thing that existed, though in hindsight it makes perfect sense that there'd be something like this out there. I knew screen readers were a thing, but I'd never considered electronic book readers.

 

[Jeri]

You can check it out under your computer speech or audio settings. I chose a voice I liked best of the ones Apple offers. They have been good about speech programming for a long time. My husband first picked up text-to-speech technology for me at a Boston MacWorld in the 1990's.

The technology has improved over the decades, but probably there is some period of adjustment where you accept what it can do and not do. If accuracy is a concern, you can always see the OCR text document and clean it up if you need to. If there is clean text, the speech sounds good. I use Unicode at UTF-8, but you have to use what works with your program. Also Apple lets you set the speed; I listen to it slightly faster than normal speech.

 

[Smitty]

Kindle has text-to-speech capability which works reasonably well. However the publisher makes Amazon disable that for the Star Trek books. Invariably someone gets their panties in a wad over rights or whatever and wants it disabled. I can understand if there is a viable alternative such as a true audiobook version and it could hurt sales of that. But that is not the case with the Trek books.
In the grand scheme of things, one could remove the DRM if present, strip the text and run it through a text to speech engine which would be equivalent of the tear out pages and scan process. For me, since I do not need it read to me I just never have done it even though I do strip DRM from most things I purchase out of principle. I feel for those that truly would benefit from it and do not have an easy option.

 

[Sto-Vo-Kory]

The problem is a spectacular case of bad timing. The Trek audio books were discontinued due to declining sales many years ago -- back when the form audio books took was CDs and tapes. By the time the MP3 revolution occurred and all audio books were released digitally (and there was an overall huge spike in audio overall), S&S Audio had already long since given up on Trek audio.

It's frustrating that both the Trek audiobook line and the Corps of Engineers eBook series both suffered from missing the upswing trends on digital audiobook and eReader sales, respectively.

Seeing the boom in audio editions for D&D novels recently, I was hoping that Star Trek books might follow suit. Glad to see that Pocket is dipping back into the Trek eBook format with their eNovellas, but I would love a monthly, ongoing series of eNovellas again, like SCE (or, SCE itself ).

 

[Jeri]

Smitty, I lift text whenever possible. I get my newspapers that way (I pay to subscribe). It's the cleanest text and easier. But a lot of things will not let me lift text; I tried it with online books right away. I bought one years ago and learned the hard way I couldn't use it; I had to buy it in hard copy and scan it anyway. Since then I don't bother and just go ahead and get the hard copy. My husband might be able to figure out how to rip the text, but he can't do everything for me. I try to do as much as I can on my own.

 

[Defcon]

As of October 2012, German language audios included (list supplied by Defcon):

Audible.de
Titan:
Eine neue Ära (Taking Wing)
Der rote König (The Red King)
Die Hunde des Orion (Orion's Hounds)
Schwert des Damokles (Sword of Damocles)
Stürmische See (Over a torrent Sea)
Synthese (Synthesis)

All read by Detlef Bierstedt, who was the German voice of Riker during TNG and "Generations".

Vanguard:
Der Vorbote (Harbinger)
Rufe den Donner (Summon the Thunder)
Ernte den Sturm (Reap the Whirlwind)
Offene Geheimnisse (Open Secrets)
Vor dem Fall (Precipice)
Enthüllungen (Declassified)

All read by Dietmar Wunder, the German voice of Daniel Craig's James Bond character.

Destiny:
Götter der Nacht (Gods of Night)
Gewöhnliche Sterbliche (Mere Mortals)
Verlorene Seelen (Lost Souls)

Read by Lutz Riedel, who was the dubbing director for the TNG movies.

You can add:

Vanguard:
Das Jüngste Gericht (What Judgments Come)
Sturm auf den Himmel (Storming Heaven)

read by: Dietmar Wunder


Titan
Gefallene Götter (Fallen Gods)

read by: Detlef Bierstedt


Movie Novelization
Star Trek Into Darkness (read by Sascha Rotermund, Cumberbatch's German voice in the movie)


And of course there is Highscore Music's full cast audio play adaption of TNG: Tod im Winter (Deth in Winter)

 

[Therin of Andor]

You can add...

Very cool! Thanks!

 

[borgboy]

It is frustrating to hear that all those books are available, just in a language I can't understand.
You'd think if there's enough of a market among German listeners to make this happen, then surely there's enough of a market in the English language market.

I listened to Sarek on audiobook this week and did really enjoy it.