Writers Workshop: IX

Kat has given us another “write a post in exactly x lines (sentences)” prompt, the value of x being 9 this time around.

I recently picked up an app called Speechify, a text-to-speech app that will read just about anything, including PDF’s, websites, and Kindle books, very helpful when you spend a couple of hours a day flat on your back, getting the excess lymph pumped out of your leg.

I have a huge backlog of books on my Kindle that I haven’t read, and I thought this would be a good way to finally get to them and through them.

Problem is, there’s no search function for my Kindle library within Speechify, and most of the books I have added to it are buried behind the books that Mary has.

See, our Kindle library has about 7700 books in it, and 7500 of those (more or less) are books that either Mary has read, is currently reading, or is planning to read.

My books are all pretty much scattered through the library; I try to keep them in a collection so that I can find them easily, but Speechify doesn’t have a way to access a specific collection, either.

I’ve written to the Speechify people and begged them to add the search and collection functions to the app, and they tell me “don’t worry, it’s coming”; I sure hope it gets here soon.

Apart from that, the application works well: it turns the words on the page into spoken words that are accurate about 90% of the time (the other 10% of the time, it’s an issue of English being English), it reads web pages really well, the voices are pleasant, if a bit mechanical, and it basically does what I licensed it to do.

I’ve really gotten into “reading” books this way, and I’m hoping that I can do a whole lot more reading using text-to-speech and audiobooks.