Comment by InsideOutSanta
16 days ago
Kindles used to provide this feature, but publishers and/or the Authors Guild stopped it, because audio rights and text rights are handled differently. In other words, when Amazon sells you a text book, it does not have the right to then also do TTS on that text and let you listen to it.
There's some contemporary discussion of what happened here: https://tidbits.com/2009/03/02/why-the-kindle-2-should-speak...
I think there is still integration with Audible, though. If you buy a book on the Kindle and on Audible, the position will sync, and you can switch between listening and reading without losing your place in the book.
Yes the feature is called WhisperSync -- I used it many years ago and it was pretty good.
I tried it while on a treadmill so it allowed me to follow the book with more focus without sacrificing much else.
Isn't whisper sync the current version that relies on owning both the ebook and audiobook?
I am not sure if this still works, but 2-3 years ago I listened to a kindle book that I bought through my Echo show device. It was pretty good. I listened to it while I was cooking. It even allowed you to carry on where you left off. But I did notice that a few pages were skipped as I had read the book before. I have since packed away my echo show so I can't verify if they have removed this feature or not.
I used that TTS feature semi-regularly on a Kindle 2.
It wasn't a good experience but it was nice to be able to keep 'reading' a book while I was exercising.
It worked for me for over a decade, until I broke the device. I don't know if I never updated the firmware or if the fact I used Calibre to convert books bypassed the feature gate.