I was going through some Text to Speech (TTS) engines such as epub2tts-kokoro, and I was wondering if we could collectively take the effort to generate audiobooks from some of the texts which are uploaded in the public domain on Marxists Internet Archive?
It would require some effort to mark the metadata as well as format the text for better chapterisation - although I think it can be a good weekend project for some of us.
Does anyone have any inputs on what hurdles I (or we) could encounter? Hosting these “audiobooks” on Internet Archive, ProleWiki, etc. is an option, I suppose. Just trying to plan ahead.
So I tried converting “White Empire” by Indrajit Samarajiva - and the TTS Engine made a whole 12 hour audiobook for the entire 70 chapters in one hour or so on my laptop! I also tried an alternative to epub2tts - I think it’s got more features but for some reason I couldn’t get it to work (yet) - Pandrator it’s called. I can’t share the audiobook here obviously for copyright reasons, but I think I’ll give Lenin’s What is to be Done a try next.
Also, so far, the few places I faced a problem with epub2tts-kokoro are at the speaking of roman numerals, some non-English pronounciations, and other such intricacies which I assume are often used within older public domain texts, although I think it made a good enough attempt at dividing the chapter names autonomously.