How To Listen to Text Books Anywhere

This post is a summary of Dr. James R. White’s own post on his aomin.org website entitled The Single Most Often Asked Question (FAQmaximus) Geekfest. I’m starting in Seminary next month at SBTS and I plan on listening to a lot of my text books in my car rides; I figured I mind as well share the geekyness with you all. I find this info extremely useful and I hope some of you do as well.

For books I can get on kindle:

• Kindle keyboard units will read books to you
• Get a free audio recording program (like Audacity, Audio Recorder, whatever – there are dozens of them out there),
• Plug the output of the Kindle into the input of your computer, fire up the reading portion of the Kindle, and record it
  • put on “faster” to get it done quicker
  • this requires real-time recording, so, set it up to record over night (depending on how long the book is)
• Load the resultant file onto your iPod and away you go.

For all other materials I cannot get on Kindle

• Use TextSpeech Pro with the voices from Cepstral
• Dump PDFs, html, docs, rtf, etc., into the program
• Choose to export
  • Works for articles, books, etc. Dr. White says he sometimes cuts and pastes portions out of books in his Logos library to read this way as well (sermon prep, for example).

If you’ve got a lot of traveling, cycling, running, etc. to do and want to work through any type of digitally written material while your doing it this is a geeky and productive way to go about it.