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iPad With VoiceOver Reads Aloud
The iPad will follow in the footsteps of science fiction's great ebook readers and will read out loud to you. Apple has announced that iBooks works with VoiceOver (the screen reader) and so will read any book, including public domain works, out loud for you.
(iPad reads to you)
Flexible VoiceOver technology will let you choose between different voices and control various aspects of voices used.
In his 1961 book Return from the Stars, sf great Stanislaw Lem wrote about what he called a lecton:
The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it.But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons - lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation. Only scientific publications having a very limited distribution were still printed, on a plastic imitation paper.
(Read more about the lecton)
From Apple.
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