Tong Family

Well, I find that I’m way more efficient listening to audiobooks than having the time to read. For some reason, I can multitask pretty well particularly when driving or trying to reset Apple Home problems (argh!). So if you are like me and you have a book that you need for a book club, then here are the easy ways to do a quick read:

1. Libby. This is a great application where you can borrow books from your local library and it will download them as digital copies.
2. Kindle Text to Speech. If that will take a long time (which it does for popular books), the next choice is to load up Kindle and see if the book supports the “Text to Speech” feature. Many new books don’t do this. They want you to buy their Audible equivalent. This is particularly good if you take advantage of Amazon delivery, which gives you $1-$3 for accepting a later delivery.
3. Audible Plans. For about $16/month you get a free Audible book every month. When American Express supported this as part of their Digital Entertainment credit, I used this to stockpile books.
4. Alexa Accessibility. There is kind of a cool feature, where you can connect your Alexa application to your Kindle catalog and turn on Accessibility so that you can have it read books for you. The voice is quite natural now.
5. Apple Voice Over. There is also a native Apple feature that reads a screen for you. You go to Settings > Accessibility > Speech > Spoken Content > Speak Screen and then you have to pull with two fingers down from the two sides of the notch. The amazing thing is that it somehow knows how to move to the next page, so you just do this and it keeps going and going. Pretty cool. As an aside, the default Samantha voice is only 11MB, so scrolling through Alex is 600MB and sounds way better, if you have the space, go for that. Zoe Premium is 400MB is nice and sounds really natural.