How to turn any eBook into an audio book
A couple of my best friends are getting pretty old. One has lost most of his sight so he can’t read very well. He can read with one eye if the words are about 4 inches from his face but he can’t spend too much time doing this. He also cannot hear great so volume needs to be sort of high for him to hear. His lovely wife reads to him some but has to yell. They both watch some movies together but he can’t see much of what is going on so he misses a bit of it. I brought them some audio books and they liked some of them quite a bit. They have a bunch of eBooks and I’ve been thinking “wouldn’t it be great if they could just have those read out loud." That is possible but the default voice was very terrible and robotic. So I spent some time trying to figure out how to fix that.
They are on Linux computers so it’s not quite as easy to get good voices as Windows and Mac. I was lead down many rabbit holes while trying to figure this out. It was harder than I expected and one night I found a program called “Pied” which is a graphical interface to help get Piper going and configuring speech-dispatcher without manual manipulation of config files. It changed the Linux voice and seemed to be going great. Then I figured out it wasn’t keeping track of where it was in the eReader program. So when I closed the program and opened it again it would start over a the beginning of the book unless you manually found out where it left off. That was sad to me and seemed too big of a flaw for them to deal with.
But then I found out that if I updated Calibre to the latest version it now has a built in voice reader with pretty great voices! I found this hilarious, I already have that program and so do they, we just have older versions. So after hours of going in circles all along I could have just updated Calibre and set them up with their own voice reader for any ebook they have or get in the future. I’d highly recommend it for anyone who would use such a thing. I set it up for them today and they seem pleased about it.
For Linux all I needed to do was copy and paste this into terminal to update it:
sudo -v && wget -nv -O- https://download.calibre-ebook.com/linux-installer.sh | sudo sh /dev/stdin
This same command will install it if you don’t have it.
For people on other operating systems here is where to download it: https://calibre-ebook.com/download
After that you load whatever book you have and want into it by clicking the “add books” icon on the top left, or click the arrow next to that icon for more options and navigate to your stored books. Once you have books loaded into your Calibre library click the view icon on the top, the icon three to the right of add books it is green with glasses – alternatively you can just double click on the book in your library list. Once the book is loaded just right click in that window and click “Read aloud.” Once that loads then on the top right there are some new options, if you click on the gears you can select new voices. The default voice pre-loaded is pretty great in my view. Scroll down to whatever language you want and you can download voices, the English section has many choices. I’d recommend the high and medium quality voices, low is noticeably worse.
Something a little funny with this program. When you load books into Calibre it creates a copy of it in the “Calibre Library” directory. So you may want to delete the old files if they are on the same computer. Some of the great things about this option is that it is all locally run, free, and open source. Once set up this works even if you are disconnected from the internet.
If you like older books and don’t have an eReader you could always just use Calibre to read you books from project Gutenberg. Sometimes I download audio books from LibreVox but it has a very limited supply, the Calibre TTS (text-to-speech) gives us a lot more options.
Links:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/