Audiobooks aren’t just for people who want to read but don’t want the hard work of holding a book. They make commutes more fulfilling, chores more rewarding, and the pleasure of having someone read to you never gets old even as you grow older.
Digital booklovers though have always had to choose between buying a text version of their book and reading it on the screen or purchasing an audiobook and listening to it on their speakers. ReadBoox solves this dilemma by allowing them to do both: it reads out ebooks — and other text too.
Setting it up is a little fiddly. Users of Android 2.2 must change the Text-to-Speech “default engine” setting on their devices. Developers Gibon Studio recommend installing speech synthesizer IVONA for Android instead of using Pico TTS which comes included, adding another layer of complication to the set up.
Users must then set the reading speed and the language (currently either English or Polish), and enable the text-to-speech software. To enable the software to read your book, it will need to be in either Epub format or a UTF-8 file with a .txt extension. The book cover will need to be either a jpeg or png file with the same name as the book file and placed in the same directory.
The effort though is worthwhile. Once set up, ReadBoox is invaluable for all those times you want to consume information but need your eyes somewhere other than the screen. Set the app as the default file reader, and any file you want to open will be read to you. Select a chunk of Web page and share it using ReadBoox instead of a social media or cloud tool and the app will read the page to you — that makes it a useful alternative to Evernote and the endless filing away of Web pages you most probably never quite get around to reading.
You have to wonder why the developers have chosen to go for a free, ad-supported version rather than a paid app. After all, users who are listening to an ebook are unlikely to look at the screen to click on an ad. However, there can be no denying that this is really the kind of function-widening app that users will and should be willing to buy.
Download ReadBoox at the Android Market:
