Casting for PodCasts

Just about every morning, at lunch, and sometimes in the evening, I take a bike ride or a walk. Now, I do this for the exercise (being overweight you have too, especially if you like to eat like I do, so you don't grow in an outward fashion). That said, being busy with work and personal hobbies, I have found I can take downloads of podcasts and audiobooks in my MP3 player and listen while exercising. Now, my wife says I should not do this, I should relax while exercising. This is how I relax was my response!

But on the serious side, I thought of this awhile back when getting my MBA. I hated driving to and from school. I felt it was a waste of my time when I could be studying, working, personal hobbies, etc. At the time there was not a bus service from my residence or at the times I needed. Attempts to get my text books in audio format were shakey at best. Most publishers would only offer the most popular books on audio (I tried asking about visually handicap patrons, but they said most texts could be provided in braille). That leads to another related experience.

While at college, there was an English professor that was blind. He would have all the students turn in their papers on disk in the WordPerfect format (text editor that is all but gone). His computer had a program that would read the "text" for him. This was several years ago, now there are several products that will do the same thing within Windows. That given, we could read text files on the fly using a device like this, so how hard would it be to read the text and have a "batch" process that records them to an audio file?

The last bit of this post leads to something I found a month or so ago. My public library has recently decided to subscribe certain electronic versions of books that patrons can download for a limited reading on their home PCs. My company, likewise, subscribes to books24x7 (and on a side note, I do not like the interface for books24x7). This leads me to believe that most publishers have their books/texts/articles in electronic format (makes sense, they have probably had it for years). If so, they could be "read" and recorded.

I also found some information that show some progress that ATT Labs did for Text To Speech (TTS). Along with some wikipedia entries here and here. My thought was to take a Java based TTS and incoporate it with the J2ME of a mobile device. To bad in my research, none of the TTS packages will not run on J2ME. For example, one from Sun and the FreeTT.
Now, you could record the books on the server and send the audio file to the device, but that is way more bandwidth, than if you sent a straight text file. You could also use it to read SMS text if you were converting right on the mobile device.

So, why aren't books being recorded this way? I know one draw back is the voice. That robot on proziac voice is not very pleasant to listen to, but newer versions of the voice software can be configured to more human like speech. Think about it. Audio on demand of books, articles, technical papers, novels, etc. I think it would be a great productivity boost so we can multi-task while commuting, exercising, etc. You could hook up your TTS-internet enabled mobile device to an FM transmitter, and have "my news channel" while you drive.

I probably let out one of my best ideas, but since I would like to see this developed for my own edification, here world, this one is a freebie!