Technical "Books On Tape"?

Samrobb writes: "The company I work for has a fairly extensive in-house technical library, and they would like to expand to include audiobooks covering both general business topics (easy to find) and technology overviews (hard to find). Has anyone come across a company or companies that make it a point to deal in technical audiobooks? The few that we've been able to find so far have been rather unimpressive MCSE tutorials."

Re:Alternatively...

[Samrobb]

Unfortunately, no. The idea was to make these available to folks with long commutes, so they wouldn't spend two hours a day on the road and then another two hours a day reading up on ATM networking or whatever. Having to haul along a laptop in the car and potentially fiddle with it periodically to get it to go on to the next page or whatnot would be less than ideal :-/

Re:Alternatively...

[Samrobb]

Interesting - thanks for the suggestion.

Alternatively...

[stx23]

OK, I can't think of any companies that do specialise in this, but it does occur to me that many tech books do come with an HTML version on CD. Would it be unreasonable to pipe the text through a speech output engine, creating something similar to your requirements?

ACM 1978 programming languages history tapes

[rombouts]

Hi -

This might be obvious, but for a number of years audio cassette tapes of the ACM "History of Programming Languages" conference held in Los Angeles in 1978 were available, I _think_ from the ACM itself.

TWR, Torrance, CA

another suggestion.

[brad3378]

Great question, in fact I considered asking it myself.

I also looked into a method of converted text to speach, and burning audio CDs or ripping MP3's of the audio. Unfortunately, I'm a newbie, so I could only find one app. @ Freshmeat that might be able to do the job. It was based on the Emacs text editor, and was designed for blind people.

As far as finding source audio, I suggest looking at the local library. A buddy of mine has made a few books on MP3 by just borrowing books on tape from the library, and connecting a tape deck to his computer. I sure wish it was easier to find MP3's like that on the web!
;-)

Recordings for the Blind and Dyslxic

[j-jahnke]

While this might not be exactly what you are looking for, both RFB and the National Libraries produce audio tapes of books for people with print handicaps. My wife has such a disability. The RFB is cool in that if you send them a few copies of a book they will produce it for you. It can take upwards of a year for them to do it.

Granted you have to be blind to use either service but it is my experience that you really want to read technical books. You get a lot more out of them that way, it is way too easy to zone out while listening to them.

RFB is at www.rfbd.org [rfbd.org]

Technology Overviews Available from Audible

[dave_aiello]

Audible, Inc. [audible.com] publishes a lot of technology-related content in streaming audio formats. In the past, they have published presentations at conferences, speeches and speech series, audio versions of investment newsletters about technology (i.e. DEMOLetter from IDG), as well as straight-forward audiobooks.

The problems with Audible, from your perspective, are that they distribute content electronically and the services that you see on their Web Site are aimed at individuals. In addition, they use security on some formats of their audio programs that is supposed to restrict your ability to use it on many different players.

However, this company has changed its offerings several times since it began, and it has a loyal following among people who appreciate spoken word audio. I would recommend that your company contact Audible by phone or email and ask them if they have ever made a distribution deal with a corporate library.
--

Dave Aiello

Re:Alternatively...

[technos]

You don't have to have a PC. Pipe Festival to a file, chunk the file, burn the files to audio CD. Hell, pop a tape in the old cassette deck, slap a patch cable to the sound card and let it go until the tape stops. Stop the Festival process, switch tapes.

My only fear is how I'm going to handle hearing ....evalevalq.q>trd!Uj:%L>061:%C>cnsvo:.... when Festival starts breaking into the Perl sample code.