While authors are agreeable when it comes to audio playback of their creative works, books published or listed in the public domain under Project Gutenburg have the freedom to be used however the reader wishes. vBookz for the iPad gives readers a mechanical (though well) sounding text-to-speech playback of their favorite open books, yet as Kyle VanHermet from Gizmodo writes,
“But if you’re not already text-to-speech inclined, vBookz probably won’t leave you a convert. I still found that it took more effort to listen to the books than to read them myself, and where I might, in some instance, listen to an audiobook, I don’t think I’d ever be able to make it through a novel’s full text-to-speech recital.”
Designed to be an aid for the visually impaired, vBooks is $5 from the iTunes App Store.
