Book People Archive

RE: talking ebooks

Eric,

This is the first time I had heard of book length MP3 files on the net. I
think Napster or some other site I came across had a few short stories, but
the file sharing was over somebody's 56K modem and was too slow. Can you
post an address for one or two of the UseNet groups you mention or a search
strategy that would turn them up. Sounds very interesting.

I have no special insights on text pre-markup, but I would think it makes a
difference which speech engine you are preparing it for. They have a fairly
wide variety of rules for handling written punctuation, parts of speech, &
etc. I doubt it is a one size fits all situation.

Leslie Evans
Los Angeles


-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Eldred [mailto:ericeldred@[redacted]
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2001 9:11 AM
To: spok+bookpeople@[redacted]
Subject: [BP] talking ebooks


a couple of remarks on talking ebooks:

1.  Audiobooks on vinyl or tape or otherwise can be converted to
MP3 format digital files and then played on a portable MP3 player,
either on solid state disks or CD-RW.  I will leave the legal
questions involved here to the lawyers.  But there are already
hundreds or thousands of such books available from UseNet groups.

2.  The World Wide Web Consortium promotes a standard for markup
of text files to enable the files to be sent through a text to
speech device.  This markup greatly improves the usual computer-
sounding speech.  But the markup must be manually applied and
takes effort not required with the MP3 method.  Can somebody
with experience of it comment on this process?

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