In the previous insight we spoke on the importance of reading through our ears if we can't seem to find the time to read in the traditional way. And for that we highlighted the wonder of audiobooks. However audiobooks require time, money, and production value to create. As someone who has spent years recording our voice for narrating documentaries, podcast interviews, and other long-form audio outputs, we can tell you it takes talent to read out a book well. Requiring professional speaking skills if not even acting skills, not to mention a soundproof space to do it in, not too different than a recording studio.
Because audiobooks are a significant amount of work to make, they typically are only made for more modern, mainstream, commercially successful texts. So what about older books? Many old texts that are packed with excellence have not been transcribed to an audiobook. The modern version of books on tape is the spoken word version of the text on the page. Either read by a human or translated digitally into an audio file, just like a book on tape. This is a technique called text to speech which is a secret weapon of outstandingness. While more texts are continually having audio analogues of themselves recorded, the only way you're going to get any ebook that has yet to have an audiobook version of itself made, is via text to speech. A technology which has changed our lives for the better and can do the same for you, if it hasn't already.
There are pieces of software which allow you to copy text and have it spoken out to you, which for the first decade or two of the tech resulted in a very robotic Stephen Hawking-like voice doing so, but now the artificial voices and even artificial intelligence voices based off real voices have gotten very good. The day we discovered that you can highlight text and copy it into a reader and push play was truly life-transformative as it allowed for our world to open up to new areas and heights which we always struggled to achieve in the past. So much so that we know our grade point average in school would have been better if the technology was around in our high school and university years. So if you're going through formal schooling now and can circumvent the big heavy analogue school textbook greed monopoly and get ebook versions of texts it’s a beautiful time to educate yourself through reading with greater ease due to the ability to have this technology at your fingertips.
Older versions of the Amazon Kindle allowed most if not all books you purchased on Kindle to also be transcribed as an audiobook. An outstanding feature they very sneakily and quietly removed in later versions because of conflicts with publishing companies over copyright of audio books vs traditional books. Even though they are a giant centralized behemoth worth a trillion dollars and continuously lower the payout percentage their app store developers receive because they apparently still aren't happy with their profit margins, we will believe it or not give credit to the richest company on spaceship Earth, Apple, and mention that more recent versions of the Mac OS operating system have an incredible feature where you can simply highlight any text, be it the full pros on an entire novel or a single article, then right click on the highlighted text and say "Read highlighted text as spoken track". BOOM! You've got an audio file that's essentially an audiobook. Either save to your machine as an audio file or created quickly from ANY text you can copy from. And we've programmed that keyboard command into an efficiency control box on our desktop, names of which go by things such as Streamdeck or Loupedeck, and our pushing that button dozens of times a day when working from home. Allowing us to read potentially doesnt of articles a day.