Let's face it...everyone is busy all of the time now, and few of us have time or motivation to sit down and read for more than a few minutes at a time. Books on Tape are excellent for long, boring ordeals in which you can't have your nose buried in a written book. My family and I use them on long road trips, at the gym, and at my agonizingly dull Helper-Monkey-type job. However, the selection is quite limited, even more so if your source is the local library.
I could free up a lot of time if I could read my textbooks while working. Unfortunately, I can't read and do my job at the same time. However, listening to books would interfere very little.
While textbooks on tape are good, textbooks on CD could have a seperate track for each chapter, section, etc, allowing you to quickly skip forward to the part you're trying to read. The pinnacle of this product would be Textbooks on MP3, which would have all of the features of the previous 2 formats, AND the ability to upload only the sections you need into your player, and perhaps even "highlight" important details with a customizable audio que ("Hey, stupid! Listen up, this next part's important.)
My implementation strategy would be to have every major publishing company (and any minor ones who could afford it) have a group of readers to put their books into these formats.
BTW, should this go under "books" or "audio?"-- nick_n_uit, Feb 04 2001 (?) Helper Monkeys http://www.halfbake...ea/Helper_20Monkeys [nick_n_uit, Feb 04 2001, last modified Oct 05 2004] Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic http://www.rfbd.org/Go to the search page and enter `calculus,' for example. [td, Feb 04 2001, last modified Oct 05 2004] Books on CD and even Textbooks on CD are here. Books on MP3 are not, mostly because of copyright protection concerns. Audible.com has a number of books and programs available in their proprietary format.-- egnor, Feb 04 2001 Well, if you really want books on MP3, I've managed to get all the Harry Potter ones for absolutely nothing on Napster...-- Wes, Feb 04 2001 Baked -- blind people need text books, see the link. I encourage you to to help bake it further. They're always looking for volunteers to read new books.-- td, Feb 04 2001 Yes and I think that would be terribly rude to those of us who are deaf. What if all the books go to Mp3's? The way most of us (younger people I mean, no offence to ya'll more socially advanced) play our music we should all be 50-70% deaf right about when they burn the last book. And in emergency situations it's hard to start a fire with a CD. And when you do get it started the fumes are very obnoxious.-- Wraith7n, Feb 05 2001 Would be irritating to those of us who don't like to be read to, either. I prefer to read at my own pace...-- StarChaser, Feb 05 2001 Wraith7n: and the current format is not "terribly rude" to the blind?-- nick_n_uit, Mar 23 2001 Well, having attempted this with Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, I've found that while the general sequence of events is easy enough to remember, specific names and places are all but impossible. Oh, well.-- nick_n_uit, Apr 22 2001 <Let's face it...everyone is busy all of the time now, and few of us have time or motivation to sit down and read for more than a few minutes at a time.> Sounds like you need to change your life.-- mrthingy, Jun 17 2003 random, halfbakery