I am a huge fan of audiobooks. I first tried them with the Harry Potter books about a year ago when I was taking the Greyhound to visit a friend in
When I arrived back home, I found audiobooks to be even more useful. Cooking dinner? Well that’s the perfect time to play an audiobook. Working on my webste? Sure! Bring on the audiobook. Driving? Audiobook! Playing a video game? Audiobook! Doing laundry? Audiobook! It never ends.
The downside is, audiobooks are pretty expensive, and my local library’s collection is a bit lacking to boot. But that’s when an idea came to me. I used to play around with Text-to-Speech programs a few years back. They were okay, very robotic sounding but understandable enough. So I decided to check out what progress had been made since I last looked. I am very impressed with the level of quality in these new Text-to-Speech engines. They seem to be crossing a threshold from robotic sounding voices to human voices with some odd quirks. At this rate, I imagine extremely realistic voices will be widely available in 5 years. There’s already some buzz on the Internet about the possibilities here. But I think application in particular could have a huge impact on libraries. eBooks have long been scorned for the eye strain they cause. But why not marry eBooks with high quality Text-to-Speech software? The end result would be audiobooks with a much smaller filesize and no cost paying a professional to read the text aloud. In the future, we could just drop a nice small text file into our MP3 players and press play. Most Text-to-Speech programs already have an option to create an mp3 file from text. This could be just the boost the eBook format needed. And it could mark a whole world of change for librarians.
In the meantime, I’ll have to make due with my favorite free audiobook site, LibriVox.
3 comments:
My family loves Jim Dale (performer of the Harry Potter audiobooks) who holds the record for the most voices in an audiobook according to the Guinness Book of World Records. He also does a good rendering of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/books/17dale.html?ex=1342324800&en=eb5ad54f25a0185c&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc
I like the idea of small files for audiobooks however I do not see how. My library offers over 4000 titles of downloadable audiobooks suitable to transfer to MP3 players to our patrons. We are part of an INCOLSA consortium using OverDrive and NetLibrary. OverDrive has bestsellers although only allow one checkout at a time. NetLibrary has a much greater range and allow multiple users to "check out" an audio book at a time.
We even offer Playaways which are dedicated MP3 players meaning that an audiobook is already loaded onto it so the patron does not have to be computer literate.
These are all free to the patrons.
Does the "Text to Speech" allow for the creation of different voices? If not, then I feel listening to a same level of voice with no differing inflection, would be boring to listen to.
This post really caught my attention since I listen to a lot of audiobooks. I subscribed to Audible after a friend convinced me that it would be the perfect antidote for my commute. The one thing that I do not like about them (other than an occasional poor narrator) is the idea of first sale. With a print copy of the same title I could pass it on to someone else once I am finished with it. That is not possible with an audiobook because of the technological locks. Frustrating!
I bought a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking last year with the intention of experimenting with it. I still haven't gotten around to it. :-(
I loved listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks! I still need to finish the series - I stopped at book 5. I 2004 I drove from Washington State back to Indiana. I listened to audiobooks most of the way. I did not know about the new technology you mentioned in your post. It seems like it could be useful. I am not sure how I would respond to a text-to-speech recording?
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