Normal reading books to audio books?
August 7th, 2016
with all you IT wizards in my asking reach i have to try.
I’m studying law and i want to kick it up a notch and take alot of courses doing the summer – therefore there will be alot (<–) of reading ahead of me.
Do any of you know if its possible to convert normal books to audio books somehow? I think by scanning all the pages of a book to a .pdf and then getting a “pdf-reading-loud” app for iphone/ipad mabey?
Anyway if you have any ideas, let me know.
Much appreciated.
Yes this can definitely be done, but you have to first ask yourself three questions. Will you take the time to manually scan hundreds of pages for an outcome that is far inferior to reading experience? The monotonous mechanical reading voices can be quite unappealing after listening to them after a while. After taking all the time scanning you still have to listen to them, which probably isn’t any faster than reading. I find that I lose concentration when listening to audiobooks as my mind tends to wander sometimes while the text is being read. That being said, you’ll need an OCR program to convert the scanned images into text. Omnipage has it’s own speech software included in the application, so you can basically scan and read with this application.
http://www.google.com?t=19419151&highlight=
I personally prefer finereader over omnipage, As I had much better results with it.
You can get it from here:
http://2baksa.net/news/91571/
That being said, As already been mentioned by , Scanning/OCRing hundreds of pages will take you a very long time! If anything, You should try finding the particular books online, Maybe they’re available in PDF or Audio form as well!
Granted, This may cost you some money (Unless you can find em pirated!) but it’ll save you tons of work!
Anyways, I recommend you use the following text-to-speech app:
http://2baksa.net/news/95547/
Also, Download the neospeech voices:
http://kickass.to/neospeech-tts-voices-julie-kate-paul-american-english-t4745451.html
You’re gonna need to use a torrent client (Such as utorrent or deluge) for this task.
These are the best (Most natural sounding) TTS voices.
I know this is probably not what you were looking for when asking the IT wizards, but I had a similar problem during my studies. And of course, especially if you want to take it up a notch has a point: Listening to a dull monotonous voice over hours isn’t going to help you with retaining the information…
What I did and what I strongly recommend is tkaing a course in speed reading (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading). Find a course with qualified coaches and learn the techniques to keep more information in less time. Much easier than trying to scan the books and listening to them as audio-books.
There probably even are a couple fo Apps out there to help you learn those techniques. Helped me out a lot!
Good luck
Listening to a dull monotonous voice over hours isn't going to help you with retaining the information...
He’s not gonna have that problem with the neospeech voices, Trust me!
I personally prefer finereader over omnipage, As I had much better results with it.
Agreed. I suggested OmniPage because that appears to be the most popular, and it also has a text to speech function built in, which might make it handier for the purpose of this request.
Listening to a dull monotonous voice over hours isn't going to help you with retaining the information...
He's not gonna have that problem with the neospeech voices, Trust me!
I’ve used both Neospeech and AT&T Natural Voices; both are excellent compared to the competition, but are irritating after long periods.
To learn about high speed book scanning and OCR conversion, go here:
http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/index.php