As a child, I read lots of sound books. Through my teenage and adult years, I have switched to listening to audio books. I’ve listened to several audio books, and they have become and important part of my education and literature. So, when I learned about read-aloud eBooks recently in a multilingual desktop publishing class, I knew I had to try it. Thanks to the instructions of my professor Max Troyer at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, I was ready to begin.

Finding an EPUB eBook

Arguably one of the hardest parts of this assignment was finding an eBook in EPUB format I  could add audio to. At first, I thought any EPUB eBook would work. Not so, I shortly found out. Most of the EPUBs I found were reflowable format, meaning they adjust to whatever screen size you view them on. Read-aloud functionality, however, only works on Fixed-Layout EBUBs, meaning it only displays correctly on a certain screen size. I eventually a Fixed-Layout EPUB called “Bella The Dragon”. It reminded me of the books I read in my childhood, so it instantly caught my attention and I decided to add audio to it.

Recording and labeling the audio

I recording myself at the MIddlebury Institute of International Studies Digital Learning Commons (DLC), which did a fabulous job instructing me how to record! They are a fabulous resource for any student with any media project. I did the recording in Audacity, which worked very well.

  After recording the audio, I had to make labels, or time markers, for each line in the book. This meant listening to every segment of the audio and manually adding in a label for each line of text. It was very tedious, but I was soon done (whew!). Fortunately, I chose to split it up by line instead of by word. This made the book easier since it meant I had fewer audio labels to make. Once the labels were complete, I exported them to a text file where I could curate them for the EPUB files.

Adding audio to the EPUB files

Once I had my audio file, I followed instructions based on Alberto Pettarin’s post How To Create EPUB 3 Read Aloud eBooks, which covers the requirements for adding audio to an EPUB file. You can find the full process there, since it is rather complicated. It involves adding IDs to the HTML elements containing text for their corresponding segments of audio and making other changes in a OPF file. Pettarin’s post covers those details really well.

One step I improved was wrapping the text in its HTML elements. Instead of just copying and pasting, I modified an expression Max gave me since his was for single words only and I was doing it for each line of text. It was a great skill to improve.

After my first attempt to add the audio, the image on the left shows the results of opening the EPUB in Readium. So now, it was time to troubleshoot. Thankfully, I had the Pagina EPUB Checker, which worked very well for troubleshooting. I also reviewed Max’s and Pettarin’s instructions and eventually figured out that I had missed a step. I had not added some of the necessary IDs to the OPF file, meaning that the audio segments could not work yet. Once I did, I repackaged the EPUB, uploaded it to Readium, and it worked! It was such a relief, especially since I was previously unsuccessful when we did the read-aloudEPUB in class.

Conclusion

Adding read-along functionality to EPUBs is DIFFICULT! There are a lot of very manual, tedious steps, but the end result is worth it. I still find it fascinating that I can time the words with certain audio segments and voila! You have a read-along EPUB! Also, the resources are hard to find, particularly Fixed-Layout EPUBs.

If I had to do this assignment again, I would probably use the InDesign approach of taking a PDF and turning it into a Fixed-Layout EPUB. That would give me an idea of how the EPUB creation works before adding the audio. Overall, I am very satisfied with the read-along eBook.