readers and hearers (or listeners)

[duszek]

Kindle is a good invention and I know many people who seem to be addicted to it.
I would get one myself but I don´t like to strain my eyes too much.

You can download on your reader books from the internet (from a shop or from a library for a certain time) and then read them whenever you want.

I hope that technicians are already working on a "hearer" or "listener": you can download spoken texts, books or programmes from the radio or lectures or self-made statements and the like, and then listen to them either through ear-phones or like from a small radio.

Does anyone know if this is true ?

With such a hearer you could connect yourself with the internet in a public library and download material for listening and then listen to it at home and educate and amuse yourself.
That way you would not even need your personal internet access at home.

Would it not be wonderful ?

[Skip]

PBS keeps advertising just such a thing. My brother, a long-distance driver, has been listening to books on the road for decades.
I can't imagine any reason you can't access an audio-library and download books just as you can download music. The only limiting factor would be whether someone (usually an actor, sometimes the author) has read a particular book aloud to be recorded. I don't think computer voice generation is good enough yet - at least our GPS keeps mispronouncing street names. But you can also put TED talks and the audio portion of anything on You Tube or open university lectures on your MPV.
Oh, and I hear that Kindles more sophisticated than mine also come with audio.

[duszek]

You can download and put it on an MP3-player, yes.
But it is not as easy as when you download a written text on a kindle reader.

My boyfriend wanted to put things on an MP3-player for me as a Christimas present for 2014 !
He was not able to do it. Just too complicated.

That´s why I thought of some very easy to handle device, like a small radio, on which you can download audible material with a few touches on a touch screen.

I know that there is some software that reads written texts, but a real voice especially of the person who has written the text makes a big difference.

[Dalek Prime]

I think something like this would be great for casual 'reading', but for texts and other learning, I'm not so sure, at least in my case. I prefer to scan repeatedly to ensure I understand what I'm reading, and flicking my eyes over text seems to help. I can't imagine doing this as readily with spoken word, scanning audibly.

[thedoc]

Sort of like a play. If you read the text, you can go back over the written word till you get it right, but at a live performance, if you miss something or don't quite understand it, you can't ask the performers to go back and do it again. If I want to remember something, I recopy it. For some reason copying it locks it into my memory, where just hearing it can get lost.

[Dalek Prime]

Sort of like a play. If you read the text, you can go back over the written word till you get it right, but at a live performance, if you miss something or don't quite understand it, you can't ask the performers to go back and do it again. If I want to remember something, I recopy it. For some reason copying it locks it into my memory, where just hearing it can get lost.

Yes. If all one needs is the gist, as in fiction, it's fine. But if you need to dissect it, not so much.

[Impenitent]

there are tons of audio books out there...

librivox.com

-Imp

[thedoc]

Sort of like a play. If you read the text, you can go back over the written word till you get it right, but at a live performance, if you miss something or don't quite understand it, you can't ask the performers to go back and do it again. If I want to remember something, I recopy it. For some reason copying it locks it into my memory, where just hearing it can get lost.

Yes. If all one needs is the gist, as in fiction, it's fine. But if you need to dissect it, not so much.

I remember one of my college professors telling about he and a friend went to see and hear an Opera. It was one of Rossini's comic Opera's, and both he and his friend understood the language of the Opera. During the Opera he and his friend were laughing at the funny sections and the jokes, all the time they were getting dirty looks from the other members of the audience who obviously didn't understand a word of it, but they were at the Opera being sophisticated and being seen. Sometimes it's important to know what is being sung and what the meaning is, just listening to the music is not always enough.

[Dalek Prime]

Sort of like a play. If you read the text, you can go back over the written word till you get it right, but at a live performance, if you miss something or don't quite understand it, you can't ask the performers to go back and do it again. If I want to remember something, I recopy it. For some reason copying it locks it into my memory, where just hearing it can get lost.

Yes. If all one needs is the gist, as in fiction, it's fine. But if you need to dissect it, not so much.

I remember one of my college professors telling about he and a friend went to see and hear an Opera. It was one of Rossini's comic Opera's, and both he and his friend understood the language of the Opera. During the Opera he and his friend were laughing at the funny sections and the jokes, all the time they were getting dirty looks from the other members of the audience who obviously didn't understand a word of it, but they were at the Opera being sophisticated and being seen. Sometimes it's important to know what is being sung and what the meaning is, just listening to the music is not always enough.

Yep. Luckily when I saw fantastic version of The Ring Cycle, it was subtitled. (Met version, with Siegfried Jerusalem.)