hey, i hope this works for you, in my effort to promote illiteracy.
it is a little something i work on lightly in my spare time.
thank you, casey chesnut.
http://www.brains-n-brawn.com/books

the problem was the lack of available audio books,
plenty are available on cassette,
but i no longer have cassette technology,
and have basically killed off cd technology in favor of mp3s.

this should work right out of the box on win2k,
there are still small issues with win2k and big issues with winNt;
i have not tested on win98 or winMe.

you should just be able to click on audioBook.exe and it will open a window.
if you have a text-to-speech engine installed,
then there should be some names in the upper drop down list.
i will find out where a really good txt to speech engine is later,
and provide that link.
select one of those names, and click the test button.
that will read a short phrase using that person's voice.

the main options are to have it read out loud, or have it write a wav file.
it will read any txt file that you specify, easiest to just put that txt file in the same dir.

i have also provided you with HowToDefendAtheism.txt.
be careful with really big txt files because i still have some mem leaks.

there are sites on the web that have other txt docs freely available.
particularly the gutenberg project which supports txt's that have expired copyrights,
or were written before copyrights even existed.

to have it read this file to you, just hit the 'read out loud' button.
as long as this file and the executable are in the same directory.

this will open another dialog, that will display the percentage of txt read.
this percentage will not be correct if you skip some of the txt to read (known bug).
the stop button works, the pause and resume buttons dont (known bug).

on the main dialog, you can select to have it skip the first 10% of the file,
and read until 20% of the file, so you do not have to sit through it all at once.
this also, works for file generation.

to have it write this file to a wav file, select the 'write to file' button.
then it will generate a wav file, which you can convert to an mp3 or wma file.
i use muchmusic to convert wav files to mp3 and wma ... it's free.

the k size of file lets you specify how much of the txt file to read into an individual wav file.
5 k of txt goes to about a 12 meg file and a ? meg mp3 depending on the quality you convert to.
i ultimately plan on having it programmatically write to mp3 or wma.
so if you specify 1k of text, the generated wav files will be smaller.
if you specify 100k of text and the txt file is only 50k big, then it will be read to a single wav file.

the wav file creation speed should be lowered on slower machines,
and if multitasking; or else it will crash (known bug)

doh! i don't feel like typing anymore

http://www.brains-n-brawn.com/books