[z3n]

I have to admit, as a former audiobook producer, I am partial to real human readers.

~~~

Yep.
Computers have come a decent way in the last few decades in making artificial voices sound more human, but when it comes to delivering sentences with contextual inflection, the technology still isn’t quite there yet.

It requires the listener to concentrate harder on the meaning of the words that they are hearing, because we are so used to communicating with each other, we can add so much extra semniotics to our oral communication subconsciously that a listener just automatically knows what is being said. With the digital reading, the listener gets worn out translating heard words into contexts.

[Dr. Sivana]

Besides that, different readers are suitable for different types of books. Mark Steyn is the rare talent who can read books with lots of foreign names, use different voices in novels for multiple characters, be serious or silly depending on what's required.

My biggest seller was Anne Catherine Emmerich's "The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ", based on the visions and interlocutions that she had about the Passion of Our Lord. Mel Gibson used it as the basis for his movie.

The book was in the public domain, but my employer, TAN Books, was the leading publisher, and Gibson himself read our edition.

Despite the fact that the book was authored by a woman, I purposely chose a male reader, as nearly all the dialogue (Our Lord, Apostles, Pilate, guards, etc.) was done by males. Blackstone Audiobooks used an older female with a thick British accent. I used a mid-Western Protestant in his 30's only requiring that he read every word as written. By the time he was done, he was convinced the work was inspired (small "i", not like Scripture, of course).

The final product was so good that several formats were optioned out by Recorded Books, a leader in the industry. Our production well-out sold the Blackstone version.