Comment by pprotas 4 days ago
I would love to have an e-reader that allows me to switch between text and audio at the press of a button. Imagine reading your book on the couch and then switching into audio mode while doing the dishes seamlessly, by connecting bluetooth headphones.
I am not sure if this still works, but 2-3 years ago I listened to a kindle book that I bought through my Echo show device. It was pretty good. I listened to it while I was cooking. It even allowed you to carry on where you left off. But I did notice that a few pages were skipped as I had read the book before. I have since packed away my echo show so I can't verify if they have removed this feature or not.
I used that TTS feature semi-regularly on a Kindle 2.
It wasn't a good experience but it was nice to be able to keep 'reading' a book while I was exercising.
It worked for me for over a decade, until I broke the device. I don't know if I never updated the firmware or if the fact I used Calibre to convert books bypassed the feature gate.
It is a supported feature in the epub 3.0 standard. It's possible to distribute an epub with audio, and have the audio sync to the HTML elements that form the ebook's text. And there is an e-reader that actually supports this feature, I can't remember which one now but it should be possible to find it with Google.
It's more of an open problem how to create those epubs. I have some code that can do it using Elevenlabs audio, but I imagine it way harder to have something similar for a human narrator.... who's going to do the sync? Maybe we need a sync AI.
You can do it easily with non-DRM books (or DRM stripped books):
For Android:
- Moon+ reader pro - some paid high-quality TTS voices (like Acapella)
For iOS:
- Kybook reader and internal iOS voices (no external TTS voices for the walled garden)
This works well enough to listen to a book while you walk and when you get back home read on the WC from the place you stopped.
Additionally if you buy a tablet or an android ebook reader, you install the app there an you can continue on your bigger/better device seamlessly.
Whisper-sync for the masses! Ahoy...
Literally started doing that this week with Amazon Audible. I gave in an started the three month 99c trial and downloaded the app.
What surprised me a good way was my Kindle app was aware of this and asked if I wanted to download the audible version of the current book I am reading.
Been listening on the way to work and then reading on the way back. Enjoying it so far.
Some Kindke books also have a checkbox to add the audio (for a fee) when you buy it. Sometimes I’ve seen books discounted to e.g. £0.99, but adding the audio might be £5.99. The upsell seems to be a good hack for adding some revenue when there’s a deep discount being used to drive interest.
Boox Ultra Tab whatever the fuck (their product naming sucks) + Readwise Reader = amazing for this
Not quite seamless but it works. It has a cursor that follows the words as they’re spoken to, which allows you to read and hear (“immersive reading”) which I find to be extremely helpful for maintaining focus.
Kindles used to provide this feature, but publishers and/or the Authors Guild stopped it, because audio rights and text rights are handled differently. In other words, when Amazon sells you a text book, it does not have the right to then also do TTS on that text and let you listen to it.
There's some contemporary discussion of what happened here: https://tidbits.com/2009/03/02/why-the-kindle-2-should-speak...
I think there is still integration with Audible, though. If you buy a book on the Kindle and on Audible, the position will sync, and you can switch between listening and reading without losing your place in the book.