eBooks Just Published to create an EPUB text to speech reader
By Paul Biba
Now this looks very, very interesting and will certainly be a huge blessing to a large community of challenged readers. Here is the beginning of a long article on the site. There are far more technical issues than I would have imagined. Speech or not, anyone who is interested in creating EPUB books will want to read the article:
Recently I’ve been working on an ePub reader prototype. Once I’ve created a robust ePub ebook reader, I’m going to move this functionality into my text to speech application, Text2Go. My goal is provide a system that will convert an ebook to speech and transfer it to your iPod in a single click. This will allow any ePub formatted ebook to be turned into an audio book which can then be listened to while driving, walking, working out at the gym or any other activity where reading is impractical.
The focus of my ePub reader is quite different from the norm due to the fact that the recipient is not a human reader but a machine reader or computerized voice. A computerized voice cares nothing for fancy layouts, font selection or images. This makes my job a lot easier in many ways. However a computerized voice lacks one important skill a human reader uses frequently, often at a subconscious level. A computerized voice has no way of skimming over a section of text. For example, human readers will never read the same footer at the bottom of every page or meticulously read every page number. If this text is mixed in with the actual body of the story (usually as a result of some blind conversion process from a different ebook format to ePub), then the computerized voice will read this text in full on every page. This becomes incredibly irritating for the human listener.
June 17th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
I’m really like the text to speech on my Kindle2, but this doesn’t look like it will work as well for me. My primary method of consuming books is still reading. However, when I am commuting or working out I use TTS. Its really useful for times when I don’t want to put that book down, but that I have to interrupt my reading [grin].
However, this requires the ability to move seamlessly from text to TTS and back to text. This application looks like it is all or nothing. You get the entire text spoken or none of it. I can see that this might be useful for people with vision problems, but it won’t fit my needs.
June 17th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Will this survive the same assault from rights holders that the Kindle TTS feature did?