I Prefer it Aurally
Following up on the recent LG post concerning converting your textbooks to digital format, why not take it to the next step and have someone read the book to you as well? I spend a lot of time driving to and from work, exercising, cooking, cleaning, and so forth, which I essentially count as ‘wasted’ study hours.
I initially began taking advantage of the CrunchTime series audio format books, which I have found handy and helpful (but I will admit, if I ever meet the narrator, I may be forced to strangle him). These audiobooks are identical to the printed versions of the CrunchTime study guides and released by the same publishing company, but their production are not as wide spread as the printed versions. You can find them on Amazon, but they are only available for certain topics, usually the best sellers. To date I’ve purchased them for Torts, Contracts, CivPro, Property, Corporations, and Ethics.
Recently, one of my professors has been distributing lectures via MP3. I found myself again spending a lot of time listening to my iPod for school purposes. What felt funny was when I got to the point where I had listened to everything and didn’t really want to sit down with a book again. That’s when my brain got to thinking. We already have our books in PDF, why can’t text-to-speech be used on it?
After digging around a bit, I found a piece of software called Natural Reader from a firm named NaturalSoft. They had developed a computer program that could read text from various types of input (HTML, MS-Word docs, PDF files, etc) and actually reads the words. Their text-to-speech engine was advanced enough that I gave it a go, and using some of the more advanced voice synthesizers offered (e.g. “Paul”), I found it pretty bearable. Is it perfect? No. The ‘reader’ makes plenty of mistakes with various pronunciations and always messes up various legal jargon including the numerous footnotes and headers. But its a far cry from the Stephen Hawking type speaker that one would envision. You do have the choice of six or so voices, both male and female. You also have the ability to control the reader’s speed. I typically use a ‘-1′ setting.
A nice feature of the software is that it allows you to custom edit pronunciations. You can literally type in the mispronounced word into an editor and provide it with a phonetic equivalent. This is helpful for those various Latin terms that come up, or mapping the word ’section’ to the ‘§’ symbol or handling other commonly used abbreviations.
Another nice feature of the software is its ability to not only read the text to you live, but you can have it record the ‘output’ to a MP3, WAV, or OGG file. In other words, export the text as an audio file. The tool can also handle batch jobs — meaning you can hand it a group of files and it’ll convert all of them to your chosen format. I dropped in a dozen chapters from a book and let them covert over night. The following morning, I had a dozen new audio files for my iPod. A downside to the batch job processing is that it only support text files, but lucky for us a new feature found in Adobe Acrobat 9 is the ability to export the file as a text file (it also can be exported in many other formats such as html, word, postscript, etc., but all are irrelevant to our discussion here).
As a demonstration, I exported a chapter of my Agency textbook from the PDF I have to text, and then had the software convert two paragraphs for your sampling pleasure. The original text was as follows:
Agents and principals can each be individual human beings or organizations, such as corporations, not-for-profit corporations, partnerships, and limited liability companies. The R. 2d mostly contemplates individual actors, while the R.3d gives considerable attention to organizations both as principals and agents.
The agency relationship may at first appear to involve only the principal and the agent. But principals typically use agents to deal with others. As a result, third parties figure prominently in the law of agency, and an agent often functions as the principal’s “interface” with some part of the rest of the world.
The end result can be heard here.
So, what are the conclusions? I found it very usable, even if not perfect. Sure, the ‘reader’ will mess up here and there but usually your brain can easily figure out the word s/he meant. I usually go back and re-read it in text but I can speed read it much faster as I’ve absorbed a lot of the core material already. The software isn’t free, or cheap, but I think in the long run it is worth it for me.
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