<story><title>Free public domain audiobooks</title><url>https://librivox.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JZL003</author><text>For a technical audience, I would look at some TTS (text to speech) programs especially by google and IBM.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s definitely robotic and nothing like a nice narrator but audiobooks are amazing regardless. And your mind actually starts filling in the emotional blanks. It can also be really cool to use like internet archive&amp;#x27;s scanned book&amp;#x27;s OCR -&amp;gt; TTS and make an audiobook from a cool old book that would never be professionally narrated&lt;p&gt;And for anyone who listens to a lot of audio, I&amp;#x27;d look into using an audio equalizer. Pulling down the high frequencies (especially for some woman narrators) makes it more comfortable after many hours of listening. On android the &amp;quot;Smart audiobook&amp;quot; app has this and it&amp;#x27;s really nice. Maybe some headphones&amp;#x2F;android phones can do this globally</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Eelongate</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;And your mind actually starts filling in the emotional blanks.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve listened to numerous books (mostly but not exclusively fiction) using TTS and I&amp;#x27;d like to confirm this experience.  It&amp;#x27;s kind of remarkable, once I became accustomed to the sound of the TTS program the weirdness just sort of evaporated and I was left with an experience that feels very similar to reading visually.</text></comment>
<story><title>Free public domain audiobooks</title><url>https://librivox.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JZL003</author><text>For a technical audience, I would look at some TTS (text to speech) programs especially by google and IBM.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s definitely robotic and nothing like a nice narrator but audiobooks are amazing regardless. And your mind actually starts filling in the emotional blanks. It can also be really cool to use like internet archive&amp;#x27;s scanned book&amp;#x27;s OCR -&amp;gt; TTS and make an audiobook from a cool old book that would never be professionally narrated&lt;p&gt;And for anyone who listens to a lot of audio, I&amp;#x27;d look into using an audio equalizer. Pulling down the high frequencies (especially for some woman narrators) makes it more comfortable after many hours of listening. On android the &amp;quot;Smart audiobook&amp;quot; app has this and it&amp;#x27;s really nice. Maybe some headphones&amp;#x2F;android phones can do this globally</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>primaryobjects</author><text>iPhone users can enable Spoken Content.&lt;p&gt;Open an ebook. Swipe down with two fingers. Instant audio book.&lt;p&gt;Also, you can select the Voices option (under Spoken Content) to download high quality Siri voices.</text></comment>