Kindle Review – Kindle 2 Review, Books

Update: For all the grief I give amazon, I have to say I am well and truly impressed to see an Experimental text to speech feature in Kindle 2.0, which is now available to preorder. In my mind it really is a star feature. You can have any book, magazine or newspaper read to you, and switch from reading yourself to listening, and back, anytime.

There are a lot of situations where it would be really nice to have books read to you -

1. When you’re doing something where your hands and eyes are otherwise occupied – cooking, driving, exercising, and so forth.
2. If you’re feeling particularly lazy.
3. If your eyes are tired.
4. As you’re going to bed or are in bed.

The obvious solution is audio books – however, you have to pay for audiobooks, and the range is limited. Given that the Kindle uses Linux as its Operating system, and that there are a lot of decent text to speech software programs available for Linux, why doesn’t Amazon add in an option to let you have any kindle edition book you’ve bought read to you.

Text to Speech Synthesis software for Linux.

There are some good options available, including a huge list of free TTS software. Here’s some more information on two popular ones -

1. Festival- Arguably the most popular TTS software for Linux, with the added benefit of having unrestricted use for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. Here’s a nice blog post explaining how to use Festival.
2. eSpeak - It’s open source, works with English and other languages, and works on Linux and Windows.  Although, since we’re concentrating on the kindle, linux support is the only one we’re interested in.

What Would be Involved in adding this feature to the Kindle?

There’d be a few things involved -

1. The text i.e. the books. These are already available – both from the Kindle Store, and free classics from manybooks.net and gutenberg.org. 
2. The device – the Kindle already can play audiobooks.  
3. The OS i.e. Linux – The Kindle already runs Linux.  
4. A Text To Speech Software – We’ve already discussed two free popular TTS software programs above. One of these would need to be integrated into the Kindle, which should be relatively painless.
5. Voices – This is the voice that actually reads out the book. This would need some work to come up with better voices. However, some of the voices available today are passable.

That’s it as far as I understand. Out of these 5 parts, part 4. i.e. integrating in the Software into the Kindle, and part 5. i.e. finding a suitable voice, are the only ones that the Lab 126 team would need to work on. Honestly, a 1-2 person development team could get this done in a rather reasonable timeframe. If you want to come out with something labeled ‘Beta’ or ‘Experimental’ then under a month. And for something more polished, perhaps 2-3 months. I definitely think it’s a feature worth doing. The other option for Amazon would be to open up the Kindle platform for Kindle 3.0, and encourage 3rd party developers to develop applications like this.