So, I've been seriously considering converting a bunch of Traditional Catholic books into Audio Books.  I believe that many people could benefit from it.  It's very time-consuming, but I'm thinking that I would accept free-will donations from people who think that the books are of value to them, with the intention of funding more of the same.  So, the more people donate, the more time I could devote to generating these (and the less I would have to work at my "day job").

Here's the first section ... Part I, Chapter I, (section) 1 from St. Alphonsus' Glories of Mary.  I'll work on this regardless, but I'm hoping that enough people will donate to be able to spend more time on it rather than just a few hours one a week or something.

https://app.box.com/shared/static/39ufdyuo427hxdke9zyl0yey22oz1pxj.zip

Will this be you reading, or AI generated? I hardly find it worth even risking money on an audio book when the reader is distracting by not knowing how to speak some of the latin or other odd terms correctly, or doesn't read with a personality that matches the writing style well.

I saw an AI generated video recently, which I suspected being AI generated because of some annoying subtly unnatural details in the simulated voice, well seasoned with the usual error here and there in hopes of sounding more realistic, though all the less so.

Well done audio books are very worth it to me if I can easily speed listen to them.

Oh, it's AI ... but some of the (more expensive) platforms have made tremendous advances.  Listen to the snippet above.  It's nothing at all like the robotic voices they use to have.  They actually use real people to "train" the models in pronunciation and inflection, etc.  It's becoming much more realistic.

I think that many people can benefit from audio books, since you can listen to them while doing other things, e.g. cleaning the house, working in the yard, etc.

Yes, those of us who have gotten into audio books realize that it can be a huge maximizer of our time, and St. Alphonsus in particular always preached about not wasting a moment.  Here, if people are doing other things, whether driving (many have long commutes to work), or manual labor, cleaning the house for ladies, or cooking, or yard work ... why not listen to edifying Catholic books?

BTW ... given how I'm doing it, I could train others to join in the effort, so I hope that it's not just me doing it.

I strongly believe in never charging money for anything that could benefit souls.  No one should be deprived of spiritual benefit for lack of money.  At the same time, we could accept donations, and to whatever extent they start coming in, we could hire others to participate in the effort, and let it be their jobs.

Those who donate will participate in merit for whatever graces people receive through these audio books.  We could also add side products like selling Flash Drives or MP3 players pre-loader with various books for those who might be somewhat technically challenged, to make it as accessible as possible.

Plus, being an older man now, my eyesight continues to deteriorate, so it's good for that reason, or if people are bed ridden.

I thought about narrating myself, but I'm not sure mine is the ideal voice, and it does take much longer, since you can make mistakes, etc.

Early AI voices were horrible, but with the latest generation they're better than what I could do.  You can work through an occasional pronunciation hiccup (they are very few) by throwing in phonetic spellings.

Part of the process is to save the text out so that it could be regenerated later with other voices or even future improvements.

Latin is more work since currently there aren't any voices specifically trained in ecclesiastical Latin, so I'm taking Spanish or Italian and then making phonetic alterations to the text to get the pronunciation as close to correct as possible.  But there may be ways to train a voice to do ecclesiastical.

The sermons I put up cost about 11-15 cent per sermon. 

That's to get a good quality read out. 

So a book is going to cost in the range of 7-10 dollars.

How long does it take to convert an average book?

To scan, process, and export? I think the fastest way to scan a book for AI to read would be to make an HD video of the pages being flipped through, if the AI is setup to read from that. Then even a big book would still take less than an hour.