yRead - 3.0.0.9

yRead will load a plain text (TXT) or HTML file and display it in a single-column, resizable window. Then it will read the file to you out loud, using human speech. You can even get voices for other languages (see the yRead links page for details) Use it to listen to ebooks, your own writings or any other piece of text.

Here's another suggestion: Load a book into yRead, set up a sound recorder on your PC, then play the yRead file. The recorder will save to a WAV (which will be huge), and then you use a WAV to MP3 program like CDEX to condense the finished file. (Use low quality, e.g. a bit rate of 64 in mono). Once finished, transfer the MP3 file to a portable player and you'll have an audio book on the run!

yRead now includes a catalogue screen for the online Gutenberg archive - it will retrieve the latest catalogue, show you a sorted list of all titles and allow you to pick, download and listen to any of them. yRead includes a translation table (see the help file). This enables you to build a series of phonetic spellings so that mis-pronounced words will come out correctly. This is a fairly dumb string replace, so if you replace 'e' with 'x' you'll havx to livx with the consxquxncxs.

If you're looking for a similar tool for Linux or OSX, try festival KDE on Linux contains several programs with text to speech interfaces.