Reading ebooks on anything else but a computer monitor seems really evil to me, especially since there are no eye implants that work as your own eyes, and trying to go as far as grabbing ebooks for iPhone or your media player seems a bit strange to me. Don't get me wrong, I understand those who really have no other choice in some situations, but I think most of those reading ebooks on devices with screens below 5" do it to show off...
On the other hand, I would really like to get some ebooks for iPhone or a media player, as long as I can listen to them. No, I am not talking about audio books, but regular ebooks in TXT or PDF format, books that are being read by some piece of software installed on the device. Now, that's really interesting, don't you think?
Read 2 Me is a new app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and its purpose is exactly that one that I described above - to allow its users to listen to their ebooks! Using Acapela-Group's text-to-speech synthesis technology, Read 2 Me comes from Retinal Media, and offers productivity and accessibility features in the same package, for a pretty good price.
The features of this ebooks for iPhone tool include:
- Optimization for Gutenberg.org plain-text ASCII files
- Optimization for ANY.txt file (UTF-8, Ascii encoding) at any web-based URL
- Prev/Next custom bookmarking navigation
- Elegant scrolling text view of imported text with line break optimization for ease on the eyes
- Automatic scrolling of the spoken text
- Easy navigation of sections of texts, saved bookmarks, and library content
Priced at $6.99, Read 2 Me is available via the Apple iTunes App Store, and it only requires iPhone or iPod Touch 2.2.1 or later. Unfortunately, it seems PDF files are not supported, but I guess they'll solve this issue in a future version. After all, we're talking about a program that's brand new on the market here, so... welcome to the world, Read 2 Me! ;)
