Hi! Would love to get a response from someone there on this one.

I commute to work every day, but I drive. I find that I enjoy listening to instructional cassette tapes from my library whenever I get a chance, and that inspired the question -- is there any chance that O'Reilly might have some Text To Speech (TTS) friendly versions of texts available? Maybe something in HTML or just plain ASCII text? There are lots of TTS engines out there, and I'd even be willing to write something up maybe that would make it easy to fast forward rewind through text with a single keystroke.

My big point is though -- if TTS friendly versions of your books were available, I'd be very happy to be able to listen to your books while I drive... It would be terrific study material.

Thanks,
Chris

Chris,

This is an intriguing suggestion. We've actually provided books in TTS format through Books for the Blind, but only to certified blind users.

We also spent some time trying to do high quality technical audio tapes back in about 1995. These were NPR-style interviews with Internet luminaries, talking about their work. They didn't sell all that well, though, and so we stopped doing them.

This is one of the problems in publishing: things that seem like they ought to be useful don't necessarily sell well enough for bookstores to want to carry them. And while online bookstores help, with their "infinite shelf space", there are still products that won't sell enough copies to justify the effort required to create them.

Note that as publishers start experimenting with "open source" books, you can try working with some of those titles. For example, our Open Sources book is available for free download. (This is a collection of essays about Open Source software and related topics, and so it is particularly appropriate for listening to while commuting.) There is also extensive free documentation for Linux (the Linux HowTos), for Perl, and for the GNU software.

I have to say that I wonder how useful some technical texts would be in audio format. After all, it's tough to follow some of these topics without your hands on the keyboard to try things out. If you're configuring sendmail, for instance, would you really remember the details by the time you got out of your car?

Anyway, it's an intriguing idea, and one we may do more with once the industry gets further along with mechanisms for payment for pure online product.

--Tim

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