How to make any public domain book an audio book using text to speech synthesis from the Windows XP Language Bar

There are thousands of great books from the past that are public domain and whose complete text can be obtained for free at the Project Gutenberg website, but reading an eBook on a computer isn't much fun and gets uncomfortable after a while. Why not let your computer read it to you? You can even do something else while you listen.

It's simple to do:

1. Find a book you want at Project Gutenberg.
2. Download it in plain text format.
3. Open it in Microsoft Word or WordPad.
4. Select the text you want to hear.
5. On the Windows XP Language Bar, click Speak Text.

The Windows XP Language Bar

• If the Language Bar isn't visible on your screen, right click in an empty area of the Task Bar (the blue band along the bottom of your screen) and click Toolbars > Language Bar.
• If some of the Language Bar buttons seem to be hidden, right-click on any button that's visible, and click "Adjust the language band position" to bring the rest of the buttons into view.
• The two buttons for Text To Speech are Speak Text and Pause Speaking. If they aren't there, click the Options arrow at the lower right corner of the Language Bar, and then click on the icons of the buttons you want to make visible.

Text To Speech Settings

You can select which synthesized voice is used and set the speed at which it talks by going to Start > Control Panel > Speech > Text To Speech.

I find these settings the easiest to understand:

• Microsoft Sam
• Speed = Normal (center setting).

Other uses for Speak Text

• If a web page is very long or the print is too small or it's formatted badly (like white text on a black background), you can select and copy its text, paste it into a Word document, and let Speak Text speak it to you while you do something else.

To turn an entire book into a portable MP3 audio book

The specific applications named below came with my Audigy2 sound board. Your applications may differ, but the basic method will be similar:

1. Open Creative Surround Mixer (the sound board's global audio settings utility) and set the audio source for recording to Wave/MP3.
2. Open Creative WaveStudio (program for recording and editing .wav/audio files), create a new blank file in Mono mode, and start recording.
3. Open the eBook in Word or WordPad, select the text you want to record, and press Speak Text on the Windows XP Language Bar.
4. WaveStudio will record the audio while the Text To Speech synthesizer speaks it.
5. When it's done, stop recording and save the audio file as MP3.

It is now a portable MP3 file that you or your children or your friends can listen to anywhere.

Recording printed books to audio format

The essential trick to recording a printed book is getting the text off the printed page and into a text file on your computer so you can follow the same steps described above. It is possible to do, although you might find that it's more trouble than it's worth.

For each page:

1. Use a flatbed scanner to scan the page.
2. If your scanner software provides Optical Character Recognition (OCR), have it save the scan to a text file which you can then open with Word.
3. If your scanner software does not provide built-in OCR, save the scan as an image in TIFF format. You'll need to convert the image to text as a separate step. One application that can do this from .MDI or .TIFF files is Microsoft Office Document Imaging. In Windows Explorer, Right-click the scanned image and select Open With... Microsoft Office Document Imaging. After it opens, click Tools > Recognize Text Using OCR. When it finishes, Select All, Copy, and then Paste the text into a Word document. There might be other applications that can do this OCR operation more easily.

Benefits

I like listening to books this way because

1. The vocabulary used in them is richer and more colorful than the vocabulary in TV shows, and hearing language used well in a good book helps my own writing and speaking.
2. Constructing the scenes and characters in my mind makes my own imagination part of the creative process.
3. I enjoy comparing the styles of different authors.
4. While listening, rather than reading visually, it is easier to analyze and think about a book's structure and composition, asking questions such as: What factors make this book good (or not)? What scenes (out of the many possible ones) did the author choose to relate? How does the scene I'm listening to contribute to the whole and build the story?

I started doing this when I was sick and couldn't listen to any of my favorite recorded TV shows because they're all comedies and laughing brought on coughing fits.

Lately, though, I've been turning off the TV and listening to books because they're more satisfying.

Comments and questions