That said, there are some masterful people out there doing audiobook reading. Most author-read books are so-so, but even some of them are very good.

I like books, in every form. Except braille. I just can’t seem to get the hang of that one. Luckily, I’m not blind or deaf. Or impotent.

In the case of audiobooks & ebooks, just because one person doesn’t like them; so too text-to-speech.

These are all just different ways to access books – some people will like some ways, others will like others.

So, no longer will I be “anti-text-to-speech” … but I do reserve the right to prefer human-read ones.

I don’t have experience with Samanta, the best voice available for the Kindle, but I have lots of experience listening to her and other text-to-speech readers on computers.

Please don’t mention Microsoft Sam — it is awful, but the newer Anna, which came free with my recent Windows Vista, is pretty good, though not compared to Samantha, and another great voice I purchased recently, with a British accent, from Nuance: Serena. They are very good.

What people don’t realize is that readers add their own interpretation of the characters when they are reading. They are trying to sell their interpretation and often exaggerate the humor or emotion where it doesn’t belong.

Text-to-speech readers don’t try to exaggerate — they just read the words, and on the new, good ones (which all cost money), their pronunciation is usually just fine.

Especially delicious was Serena, a voice with a British accent, when I was recently listening to Sherlock Holmes stories. I have also listened to about half of the Henry James novels and most of the Sue Grafton alphabet detective novels, among many others. Other great voices are Crystal, from AT&T, and Heather, I forget the company. All these voices can be purchased for about $30 or so from several places, but the main one is http://www.nextup.com, where you can also hear samples. But the quality of these voices is better appreciated with a long test, just as you might take awhile to get used to a human reader. Once you get used to text-to-speech, humans often sound like they are tugging at your sleeve, begging you to respond.

Great human readers are great, but sometimes we don’t want a treatment, we just want what the authors put into the novels. Good computer voices give us that.

Unlike some people in this thread, I love Neal Gaiman, an amazing reader, by the way.

I dont want to hear a computer read to me, when i call someplace and get a recording i just yell “HUMAN” until i get someone with a pulse.

kindle is a joke, even a boring book when read by a person who liked it is better than a puter spittin out words.

By the way, this site is AWESOME, if i didnt constantly yawn when i read i would do a book… im working on the yawning.

Supposedly, Toshiba voice can be “trained” by your own reading voice.
You type in a long excerpt of anything, plug in a mic and read it aloud, then submit it. It teaches the computer how to pronounce words properly. The difference in the voice after training was marginal.

Setting the option for longer pauses did make a a good difference. Pronunciations, tone, inflection, still not that great, lots of errors, but 10x better than horrible Microsoft Sam.

There is presently software for sale that installs your choice of different reading voices, in many different accents and languages, on your PC. Some are halfway decent. So…with such improvements already being developed, a few years down the road, at most, I expect we’ll be seeing (hearing) perfectly acceptable text aloud readers.

Companies that own devices such as the Kindle with voice readers will have to pay a little extra to the book owners, when that happens. Copyrighted audio SHOULD be paid for, just like the text versions.

I expect we’ll also see some type of DRM included with ebooks that prevents text aloud readers from executing unless the buyer has purchased that option with the book. Then we’ll see just as many illicit “cracks” and workarounds being distributed across the internet…

I re-enacted the parts I’d already heard and then we listened to the rest together. I’ve never spent a closer, finer time with him. 3 hours, cuddled on sofa, each with one of the earphones in, and we were mesmerized. I watched his face as he listened, his eyes widening with excitement, joy or fear. It was wonderful.

We even let the dog out, inching our way to the back door, shoulder to shoulder, so as not to dislodge our shared earphones. He didn’t want to miss a second. (Neil Gaiman, we love you!) At the end, grandson said solemnly, “THIS is going to be a GREAT movie, Mom-Mom”.

We always listen to audio book CDS in car on trips to beach, or where ever…but MP3 player style was a whole new experience for him and now he’s hooked. But no way would we listen if it was a “computer-generated” voice. Ick.

And for the poster above who doesn’t like Gaimans’s books, may I suggest something like “The Road”. I bought that in audio for my grown son. He listened every day while driving back and forth to work. He’s a tough ex-Marine, manly-man type, yet the book made him cry…