You are now ready to listen to your entire library.
So you have a book that you want to make into an audio book. Hey that’s nice! we all have wants! Well, before I make fun of you and your stupid needs, there actually IS an easy way to make an audio book if you have a MAC. The things you will need, and that are built right into MAC OSX are iTunes, VoiceOver, and GarageBand. You will also benefit from having Adobe Acrobat Pro. If you don’t have this, there are plenty of free PDF readers/ writers out there. You can even download a free 30 day trial version of Adobe Acrobat from Adobe.com. Now that you have these, you need the book.
If you are scanning a book from your local library, shame on you! but you can scan it and in Adobe Acrobat Pro, click in the Menu Document, under Document click on OCR Text Recognition, Recognize Text Using OCR. this will create a text copy able version of the pdf and you can now select call, and copy all of that text into Text Edit.
Now Open Garage Band, or an easier program I often use is Audacity. Which you can download here. and hit record. This will begin audio recording. You may want to make sure you are in a quiet atmosphere as this will record everything the microphone can hear.
Now that you have the text in Text Edit and you are recording the audio, you can ctrl+click or right click and “select all” then ctrl+click or right click and move down to speech and select start speeking. The screen reader will begin speaking everything that is in the text edit box. You are now creating an audio book.
After the book is done recording, you can save the audacity file as an mp3 and load it into itunes. In iTunes you will need to change the audio type to audio-book for it to be correctly categorized in your ip0d or iphone. See the video tutorial in the following link.
Make an Audio Book Tutorial using your MAC
There you have it! Now you have created an audio book, although not the most emotional or expressive voice, you are at least getting read to, even if by a robot.
