Two of them, actually. Each is a part of the burgeoning universe of audiobooks, and both of them surprised me, as a Damon Runyon character would phrase it, more than somewhat.

The first surprise found me becoming for the first time an enthusiastic audiobook listener.

Now I’ve always respected the medium, and have even been a cheerleader for audio as I’ve watched it grow from severely abridged cassettes in truck stops to today’s world of universally available unabridged downloads. I was an audiobook narrator thirty years before I became an audiobook listener, and found the task at once demanding, exhausting— and hugely satisfying.

(And, back in the day, not without its amusements. Once, midway through a recording session for one of the Burglar books, the engineer/director, who’d only read the abridgement, asked for clarification. “Bernie seems like a regular guy,” he said, “and I gather Carolyn’s a nice-looking woman, so what I don’t get is how come he never puts the moves on her?” I asked if the abridgement had somehow deleted the information that she was a lesbian, and his jaw dropped. “You’re kidding. She’s gay???”)

My respect for audio increased when I saw it make books available to friends who had never been readers. One woman, for whom dyslexia had made the whole notion of reading for pleasure a contradiction in terms, got through a cross-country flight with a cassette of one of my Scudder books and landed wondering where this had been all her life.

So I’ve thought highly of audio, and was ever grateful to the voice artists who narrated my books and the enterprising chaps who published them. Indeed, when Audible’s ACX division made it possible to pair up with narrators and self-publish those works of mine that hadn’t interested mainstream audio publishers, I jumped right in. With both feet—I’ve brought out 45 titles in this fashion, and have had the pleasure of working with a dozen talented narrator-producers. I’ve even teamed up with a fellow in Germany who has been narrating and producing some translated editions.

The only thing I didn’t seem to do with audiobooks was listen to them.

I tried a few times, but it never worked. When I was driving, any verbal input that reached my ears came as an unwelcome distraction. If I was free to give an audiobook my full attention, it never seemed to hold it. My mind would wander, my eyes would glaze over, and my hand would reach for something to read. I concluded that I absorb information more effectively through my eyes than my ears, and that was fine with me.

Until it wasn’t.

Age has very likely had something to do with it. My eyes don’t work as well as they used to. (And why should they? Nothing else does.) And something has had its pernicious way with my attention span. Just as I used to interrupt audiobooks by picking up something to read, so do I now interrupt printed books by reaching for my iPhone.

I wondered if I might perhaps have aged into audio, even as I appeared to have aged out of optical reading. While I was thinking about this, I replaced my old hearing aids with a top-of-the-line pair. (How good are they? Well, walking home from Fourteenth Street, I was startled to hear a mouse fart in Philadelphia.) Among the improvements, a Bluetooth connection—whatever that is—enables me to play an audiobook on an app on my phone and have it beam directly into my ears.

Who knew?

And who knew that audio could enable me to give myself over entirely to an author whom I won’t name, and whose books I have never been able to read? He refuses to use quotation marks, and his punctuation in general is an exercise in self-indulgence, and a few other stylistic quirks have stopped me cold, and on one occasion led me to heave the arrogant bastard’s book across the room.

But, with a good narrator in charge, all of this disappears. Long story short—well, it may be too late for that—I enjoyed the book immensely over a period of several days, and emerged from it with my eyes in good shape and the strong sense that what I’d heard would stay with me. And just today, during a break from drafting what you’re reading now, I read a review in this morning’s New York Times, decided the book sounded interesting, booted up the app on my phone, downloaded the thing, and had a marvelous time listening to the first hour of it .

And my second new trick?

It’s part of the brave new world of Artificial Intelligence. I spent the greater part of my most recent newsletter discussing some aspects of AI, especially the foofaraw over its learning to write by reading whole shelves of books. (I found this reasonable enough; that, after all, is how I learned to write—by reading what others had written before me. Isn’t that how everybody learns to write?)

I don’t know what AI is going to amount to, or how to feel about it,  and I have a hunch I share that ignorance with most of the world, not excepting those people who are devoting their lives to its development. But I don’t doubt for a moment that AI is going to be a massive game-changer, and just this month I’ve been getting a taste of how it’s already changing a game of which I myself have been a player.

Audiobooks. Specifically, self-published audiobooks.

As I mentioned, I’ve published 45 of the little darlings. Add in the several dozen titles available from commercial audio publishers and the total’s impressive, but it still doesn’t account for all the books I’ve perpetrated over the years. And, because ego and avarice have rendered me shameless, virtually all my pseudonymous early work is readily available in ebook and paperback form.

But not all of it was in audio. My audio self-publishing had essentially stopped during the pandemic, and I didn’t think the potential audience for the remaining titles justified the effort and expense that would be required of me and my narrator-producer partners. I’m an old man, my writing days are over, my energy and enthusiasm are limited—and just how desperately does the world need audio renditions of the sexological case histories of John Warren Wells or the erotic fictions of Andrew Shaw?

So what changed my mind?

You know, I have to think the first new trick, with the narrative voice of Tom Stechschulte resonating miraculously in my ears, must have made me take notice of an easy-to-ignore email about Audible’s Beta program. I’d been aware of it before, regarding it as a fascinating phenomenon without even considering my own participation therein. But this time around I gave it a second thought, and a few mouse clicks suggested it was something into which I could, without a great deal of trouble, dip a toe.

Within a couple of days, I’d clicked my mouse enough times to get the attention of its musical cousin in Philadelphia. And not without effect. Thirty-nine books of mine, previously destined to be silent for all eternity, are now Out There to be listened to.

Just. Like. That.

From the Collection of Classic Erotica: Butch, Circle of Sinners, College for Sinners, Community of Women, Flesh Mob, Flesh Parade, Girls on the Prowl, High School Sex Club, I Sell Love, Kept, Lust Weekend, Man for Rent, Passion Nightmare, Sex Takes a Holiday, Sexpot!, Sin Bum, Sin Master, Sin Time, The Sin-Damned, Trailer Trollop, Tramp, The Twisted Ones, and The Wife-Swappers.

By John Warren Wells: Come Fly With Us, Doing It!, Eros and Capricorn, Love at a Tender Age, The Male Hustler, Sex and the Stewardess, The Sex Therapists, Sex Without Strings, The New Sexual Underground, The Taboo Breakers, Tricks of the Trade, Versatile Ladies, and The Wife-Swap Report.

Finally (at least for the time being) a collection of short stories—Some Days You Get the Bear—and Afterthoughts Version 2.0, which the original publishers called “a must-read for Block fans and mystery lovers alike.” Easy for them to say…

And just how good or bad is the AI-generated narration? Hard for me to say, but here’s how a trusted associate reacted: “That is wild! The only thing that gives it away is some odd inflection, but after a little bit, even that stops standing out. I doubt this will kill jobs for voice actors, but it sure is amazing. Who knew?”

Well, I sure didn’t. If you’re eager to find out for yourself, it’s an easy itch to scratch. I’d thought about filling this newsletter with links, but decided to play the Old Man card and spare myself all that work. Just enter any title + Lawrence Block in the search engine at either Amazon or Audible. I’ve priced the AI-generated audiobooks at a low $9.99 apiece, and some may be free to Kinde Unlimited members; in any event, they’re as unlikely to impoverish you as they are to make me rich.

And will the new technology kill jobs for voice actors? I’m not so sure that it won’t. In the area of verbal composition, AI is already being widely used to create property descriptions for realtors; that’s a lower bar than the bestseller list, to be sure, but it’s saving a lot of time for a lot of real estate salespersons, many of whom may not be that verbally agile in the first place. By the same token, a lot of routine narration can be handed off to AI. If it saves time and effort, it’s gonna happen.

“Nobody knows anything.” That’s what William Goldman famously said of the film industry, and I think it applies at least as well to Artificial Intelligence. One of the few things I think I know about it is that it’s in its infancy, and indeed barely out of the womb. By the time you finish reading this newsletter, it will be a little bit further along than when you started, and I can’t begin to imagine what it’ll be like a year from now, or two years, or five. My best guess is that it will replace some voice actors, and some writers, and some translators—and, because creation flows alongside destruction in any successful technology, it will inevitably bring new jobs and new opportunities.

Unless it doesn’t.

But I’m just guessing, and what do I know? I’m going to wrap this up and listen to some more of my current audiobook. It’s a memoir, and it’s narrated quite capably by the woman who wrote it. I can only wonder which of her two jobs will be eliminated first…

Cheers,

PS: As always, please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might find it of interest. And, if you yourself have received the newsletter from a friend and would like your own subscription, that’s easily arranged; an email to lawbloc@gmail.com with LB’s Newsletter in the subject line will get the job done.