One Library to Go, Please

by Rean Rhyne, Technology Editor

Such a companion exists and costs only $24.95. It’s a reading program called TextAloud MP3 and works like this.

The program comes with its own built-in voices which are a significant improvement over the previously available Robbie-the-Robot voices of earlier text readers.

The Natural Voices can’t be downloaded. They come only on CD so some planning-ahead to allow time for mail delivery is required here if you’re preparing for a trip.

After you have both programs, the next step is to decide what texts you want to take with you.

which for dog’s years has been making the great works of the past (read "public domain") available free for the downloading. Novels, memoirs, biographies, philosophy, poetry: whatever people have written that’s survived, there’s a good chance you’ll find it at Project Gutenberg.

Example: I was browsing the long, long list of works and stumbled upon P.G. Wodehouse. There I discovered that before he hit on Jeeves and Bertie he was an active writer of fiction. I downloaded a novel I’d never heard of called Psmith, Journalist, which turned out to be a jewel of a book that eased my way across a goodly portion of the Great Plains of middle America.

You no doubt will make your own happy and serendipitous discoveries at Project Gutenberg or any of the many, similar (though less well-endowed) sites.

After you have your texts in hand, or in hard-drive, then you let TextAloud do its thing. You choose whatever voice you want, load a text into the program, and tell it to convert.

Of course you can listen as TextAloud works but that would be impossibly time-consuming, so you tell TextAloud to work silently, which means that the program can convert an average-length book in 30 to 45 minutes.

"Convert?" you say.

Yes, convert. What TextAloud does is change the written text file into a spoken MP3 file. When it’s finished all you need do is burn the MP3 file onto a CD and you’re done.

Actually, you should wait until you have converted several books, because the MP3 files are surprisingly small and you can get several on one CD.

On a recent trip, one of my CD’s contained all of the following: the G.K. Chesterton Father Brown stories, Frank Harris’s biography of Oscar Wilde, a huge anthology of English detective stories, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and several of the Wodehouse Archie novels.

Once you have your portable library ready, then you’re faced with the small problem of what to play the CD’s on. These are, remember, not ordinary CD’s but MP3 CD’s, which older, standard CD players will not play.

Two solutions:

1. Recent car CD players, especially upper-end models, can play MP3 CD’s.

2. Otherwise what you do is trek to your nearest electronics department and buy a portable CD MP3 player, which can be had for as little as $50. They all come with headphones, so at that point you’re set.

If you want to listen to the CD’s over the car speakers, you can pay another $20 and get a little plug-in transmitter that sends the signal from the CD MP3 player to the car radio.

Whew! Is it worth the trouble?

Opinions will vary. For me on a long driving trip, yes, yes, and yes, mainly because of the sorry state of American radio. Sure, you can check out books on tape from your local library but then you’re always having to change tapes while negotiating a toll booth or slowing for a radar trap. With the MP3 format, the entire book is always right there and will play from beginning to end if you want it to.

Victorian travelers only had to worry about lap blankets and porters. But, unless they had a bevy of servants, they had to do their own reading. TextAloud is a taste of 21^st cyber-luxury that Victorian travelers couldn’t have imagined.

END