Showing posts with label Reading Community. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reading Community. Show all posts

Saturday, March 18, 2023

Immortal Works Is Having A Sale...You'd Better Hurry, Though


 Attention Readers: There's a sale!

Five years ago a little independent publishing house took a chance on my little book. Hopefully, they don't regret their decision. I know it's something I'm proud I did. And who knows...maybe they'll take another chance on me if I ever got my butt in gear and delivered those stories I'm sure they're sick of hearing about.

If you click: HERE, you can see all the books (paperback only...) that are on sale between now and Monday, 3/20/23. If you keep scrolling, you'll see a humble little book about a boy, his dog, and an interstellar adventure, or you can just click: HERE for a shortcut.

Back when Immortal Works first started I tried reading every book they published. Then, they just kept cranking them out. I finally gave up--there's so many books. And they're all on sale for a few more days.

Like any request to buy books, purchasing is wonderful, reading is the purpose of the book in the first place, and leaving a review is icing on the cake. If you're a reader, check out the list, order one (or several...), read it and review it. There's an entire library for you to explore and enjoy. Give the stories and adventures Immortal Works a chance. You won't be disappointed.

Monday, January 23, 2023

Looking For A Good Text-To-Speech App...


 There was a time when I listened to books, listened to a lot of books. I burned through so many books I was running out audiobooks at our local library.

Not really, but I did run out of books I wanted to read.

I was reading at least one, and sometimes two books every week )then I discovered podcasts and my audiobook listening has dwindled to almost nothing...). I got so addicted to audiobooks, I tried to find an app for my phone that would take any book and turn it into an audiobook, mostly so I could enjoy books written by my author friends whose books were not available in audiobook format.

I finally found an app that worked quite well. It was called PDF to Audio Offline. Today I got a new book to read. I fired up my phone and tried to add it to the app. The problem--I needed to download it again since I hadn't accessed it in some time. That's when I discovered that app was no longer available.

Bummer.

So, I went on a hunt. I searched for a new text-to-speech reader. I found one and started the book. I first tried to increase the reading rate to 1.5 times. It played for a few seconds then I got a message that I would have to pay $12/mth for the privilege of having the material read quicker. 

Nope.

I decided the normal rate would be okay, but I noticed the speech was not reading the words correctly. In fact, it was creating new words that were not in the text, example, it turned "just" into "fust."

Nope.

I downloaded a couple of other apps and haven't been able to get what I once had. I'll need to do more hunting.

We live in such an amazing times. The very thought that we can take any book, download a digital copy, then be able to have a program read it out loud boggles the mind. I'm hoping there's an app out there that will allow me to do it. We'll see.