Firing voice actors is not great. Replacing human-narrated audio with AI narrated audio is not great.

But the coverage of audiobooks is… also not great? Of the books I've purchased recently, maybe 30% or less have audiobooks? What if I want to listen to an obscure book? Should I be paying a human narrator to narrate my personal library?

The copyright holders are incentivized to make money. It does not make financial sense to pay humans to narrate their entire catalog. As long as they're the only ones allowed to distribute derivative works, we're kind of in a pickle.

> What if I want to listen to an obscure book? Should I be paying a human narrator to narrate my personal library?

You weren't doing that before AI either, were you?

The practical answer has already been "you pipe an ebook through a narrator/speech synthesizer program".

> The copyright holders are incentivized to make money.

Regulations exist. It'd be rather trivial to pass a law mandating every ebook sold to be useable with screen readers. There's already laws for websites, albeit a bit poorly enforced.