Turning Any iBook Into An Audio Book For Free

Posted in Tips on 28. Jun, 2010

I’m at a Bestwestern, waiting to meet someone. Good time to talk about something I discovered.

Now this is tight. You know how there’s people out there that like to “read books” by listening to them? They buy audio books of whatever book they like and listen to them in the car, while working out, whatever. Most do it through audible.com.

The problem with that is only the best selling books are in audio book format, your not gonna’ find lesser known books there. Audio books are more expensive than regular ebooks because, of course, a lot has to be put into making an audio book. Also, although iPhones store the your current position of an MP3 (which audio books are), if you happen to reboot your phone, it’ll lose you position of the audio book. And worst of all, there’s no way to own both the ebook and the audio book without paying twice for the same book. Screw audio books.

Well, not entirely. There is a way to turn your existing ebooks from the iBooks store into audio books. …For free. Through VoiceOver.

VoiceOver is a way to use your iPhone and have it speak items and words on-screen for you. I use VoiceOver to read web pages when I’m driving on the road, through my Lexus’s speakers. You can set it so that it continues reading through a page automatically. It never worked for audio books though. It could read text on Stanza, but couldn’t automatically read to the next page. And wouldn’t work at all for the Kindle app. But it does work for the iBooks app, and it automatically reads through each page automatically.

These a few advantages of using iBooks as an audio book.

Every page is automatically saved VoiceOver turns to. So if you happen to let your iPhone run out of power, your iBooks location is automatically saved.

You only have to buy the book once. You can then read it as an eBook, or have it read to via VoiceOver.

But you have understand how to use VoiceOver. So go figure it out yourself, but here’s how to do it.

Once you have the book open, triple click your home button to bring up the accessibility menu (make sure you have your triple home button action set to “ask” in the settings).

Tap “Turn VoiceOver On”.

Tap once on the text area of the book.

Tap and drag down with two fingers to start auto-reading.

Now your book will start being read to you via your iPhone’s text-to-speech system.

To stop or pause the reading, tap with two fingers on the screen.

To exit VoiceOver, triple-click the home button.

Tap once on the “Turn VoiceOver Off” button.

Then double tab anywhere on the screen.

It’s also a really good idea to lock the orientation of your iPhone, because if you turn and your iPhone rotates, it’ll cancel the speech reading.

So this method can’t do everything. You can’t have it read to you while in the background or things like that. But that’s fine, ya know?

Now, personally, I’m not sure how much I’ll be using this feature. I personally enjoy reading a book more than listening to it. And I would use it when driving, except for the fact right now the Neocell is being used as my car GPS navigation.

So this is a pretty tight method, right?

Peace, JbB