Free Audio Books

Project Gutenberg is a project set up to put out of date books in electronic format, so those old tarzen novels
that the author died and no one really owns the copy rigths any more never die kind of deal. The advent of the
mp3 player that hangs around your neck and has massive storage capacity brigns us to the part where you actually
get audio books ...read aloud by someone so you can listen to them while you go to work or do the laundry or
such.

And who records these books ? Who sits there and over the course of a month reads a whole freaking novel into
a recorder for the benifit of their fellow man.

Well, yes, there are a number of volinteers that do exactly that. But there is also a new age alternative.
Computer speach. A computer reads the text out loud.

Tarzan of the Apes

The above link leads to a free copy of Tarzen of the Apes. Read by a computer, in mp3 format. My first impression was that the computer voice was incomprehensable , but after about 2 min I was effortlessly makeing out the words, and it was just like listening to someone with a weird accent. Once you got the accent down pat it was no problem at all. After about 20 minutes I stopped noticing the flat droning computer voice and instead closed my eyes and had a picture in my mind of what was happening in the story, I didn't even hear the computer voice anymore.

The ear adapts, and darn quickly if my experiance is any indication. And a computer generated narrative is going to be a lot cheaper to deal with than an army of volinteers that have to constantly cross check each others work. I think this whole computer reading text thing is going to take off like a rocket personally.