Apple Updates iBooks With 'Read-Aloud' Feature for Children's Books

[MacRumors]

Apple today pushed out an update to its iBooks application for iOS devices [App Store], bringing several improvements including a new "read-aloud" narrator to select children's books.

iBooks 1.3 adds several new features and improvements:

- Help your children learn to read with the new read-aloud feature included in select children's books from the iBookstore.
The read-aloud feature uses a real narrator to read the book to you, and in some books, it will even highlight the words as you read along.
- Enhanced books can now automatically play audio or video included with the book.
- Makes iBooks more responsive when opening very long books.
- Addresses an issue where some books may display the same page twice.

It is possible that the text-to-speech aspect of the new read-aloud functionality is based on technology from Nuance that has been rumored to be making its way into iOS 5, but Apple has not specifically disclosed the basis for the new feature.

We have not been able to track down any books compatible with the new read-aloud feature yet, so it will be interesting to see how quickly and how widely it is adopted by authors and publishers.

Apple's new iTunes 10.3 offers access to the iBookstore from the desktop for the first time, although an iOS device is still required to read the books.

Article Link: Apple Updates iBooks With 'Read-Aloud' Feature for Children's Books

 

[drewisanapple]

I'm hoping at the HARDWARE event in the fall (Usually the iPod Event but now the iProduct Event most likely) we see an introduction of iBooks 2.

Apple could bring a iShare Books function, or something to make it more friendly. I enjoy all my books on the iBooks App, but I feel it is still missing out on some crazy stuff it could have, even more with iCloud rising.

 

[lshaner]

I simply searched for "read-aloud" in the iTunes Store and found several book hits.
Are those something else and not using the new "read-aloud" feature?

 

[milo]

Is it a real narrator or text to speech? Because those are entirely different things.

Definitely need a book reader for computers, it's weird they didn't ship one from the start of the book store.

 

[mdorazio]

Great feature, but might be misused by parents

While I think this is a great feature to have, and is also quite a technical feat on Apple's part, it worries me that kids might be growing up listening to their iDevice narrate stories to them instead of their parents doing this. Story Time was an important part of bonding and learning with my parents when I was growing up, and this will give busy parents an easy way to outsource this part of parenting to a device.

 

[MauiBoy]

I only found one book with the read-aloud functionality:

Dragon's Alphabet Soup: Learn ABC with Eric the Dragon (ENHANCED EDITION: Read-Aloud Audio Option)

Raggedy Ann & Andy also came up with a search, but it does not indicate the "ENHANCED EDITION", as above.

 

[caspersoong]

Makes iBooks more responsive when opening very long books. That's awesome. I always waited very long to open books until it put me off.

 

[spillproof]

Neat feature.

While I think this is a great feature to have, and is also quite a technical feat on Apple's part, it worries me that kids might be growing up listening to their iDevice narrate stories to them instead of their parents doing this. Story Time was an important part of bonding and learning with my parents when I was growing up, and this will give busy parents an easy way to outsource this part of parenting to a device.

And imagine if kids started to read and speak like the text-to-speech voice because that's how they learned.

 

[notjustjay]

While I think this is a great feature to have, and is also quite a technical feat on Apple's part, it worries me that kids might be growing up listening to their iDevice narrate stories to them instead of their parents doing this. Story Time was an important part of bonding and learning with my parents when I was growing up, and this will give busy parents an easy way to outsource this part of parenting to a device.

One of my friends has a son who hangs out with me sometimes. We started bonding when we realized that we were both Calvin & Hobbes nuts. One of the things he loves to do is to sit down with someone (his parents, his older sister, sometimes me) with one of his C&H books and read the strips out loud.

The little guy is 14 now, and the other day he lamented to me that his family just doesn't have the time that they used to, to sit and read with him!

Read with your kids, folks. They will love it and remember it for a lot longer than you think!

 

[kiljoy616]

While I think this is a great feature to have, and is also quite a technical feat on Apple's part, it worries me that kids might be growing up listening to their iDevice narrate stories to them instead of their parents doing this. Story Time was an important part of bonding and learning with my parents when I was growing up, and this will give busy parents an easy way to outsource this part of parenting to a device.

That what parenting is, stop worrying and start parenting. Since I am a parent I am the one who sets a lot of the rules and its not that hard you just have to put time into. Technology like this helps when parents take time. But who has the time to be a parent is a big complaint I hear from time to time, please.

 

[eleven59]

Just tried out the dragon one. It's a boy's voice reading it out. Secondly the read out loud feature is activated with a play button at the bottom, so if you feel the need to read to them yourself, you can- you simply don't hit play.

Unfortunately there was no sample version to see how this works before buying, at least for this book

 

[Espo]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Anyone notice iBooks crashing with the update?

 

[pkshiu]

read and listen is now a click on the ITMS front page

it list 42 books include a few classics (are you my mother), and the biscuits books.