Read Me a Book 1.1.0

The book can be broken up into parts so that the audio clips are reasonably sized. You also have the possibility to set the voice and speaking rate used by the audio clips. When you launch Read Me a Book, you see the above window. Click on "Get a Book" in the menubar to go to one excellent source of book texts, choose a book and download the Plain Text file with us-ascii encoding and no compression. Copy just the book portion (do not include text above and below the book) and paste into a TextEdit file. Select "Plain Text" from the TextEdit Format menu and save as a UTF-8 text file with the file title being the book title and use ".txt" file suffix.

Before saving book Parts, the User should click on the "Test Speaking Rate" button to hear a test phrase. The speaking rate can be changed using the "Speaking Rate" slider. The voice will be the system voice as set in System Preferences / Speech. If available, Alex is an excellent male voice to use. What you hear (voice and speaking rate) will be used to make the audio clips.

The next step is to click at the end of the Part you want to save and then click on the "Save Part" button. When you click on the "Save Part" button, you see the current size of the audio clip as it builds. This status updates frequently until the audio clip is complete. Audio clips are saved in a folder on the Desktop titled "Audio Book Files".

Enhancements:

• Adds a digital readout of the "speaking rate" and lets the user hear selected text from the book to set the "speaking rate".