Tutorials on creating read aloud epubs

Hi All
I want to create read aloud epubs in Indesign CC2014. Does anyone know of a good resource were I can learn how to do this
Thanks

I've been looking at this too. I've check out most of the 3rd party Indesign add ons. CircularFLO seems to make the read-aloud option easiest, though I also want animations, and even though they have "over 70!" so-called animations they are pretty lame, and allow little controls over them. And you can't also have any InDesign native or imported Edge Animate animation in the document. I found that I can create much better animations easily inside InDesign. CircularFLO also doesn't have any added games or that sort of stuff. Though like I say, it is the easiest to do the read aloud markup. (But they don't answer emails.)
I am seriously considering the Aquadfadas InDesign tools, though their interface is a bit daunting, and I am finding their information on the website to be a bit inscrutable. They also have read-aloud, plus some animations and InDesign Native animations seem to work with it. They have Games as a premium add on. Though things can expensive pretty fast. Support is paid $130 for 1 issue for 12 hours. Yikes! (They also are not very responsive to email.)
The other solutions I've looked at Kitaboo, and Flipick don't see as robust and I don't like their business model. The third option is to do it ALL by hand in InDesign. Crack open the pub and add the SMIL file, hand coded, and mark up the sound files using Audacity, a very time-consuming and tedious process, that could go wrong, with many hours spent trying to figure out where it went wrong. And the third party apps look better and better. Adobe's peeps here on the forums have told me that they have NO PLANS to support any kind of read aloud tool in InDesign. WHY???? Clearly there is a need for it. I would even pay for such a tool separate from my rather expensive subscription to CC.
All of these companies are dismissive of the little guy/gal and they pretty clearly only want to help giant clients with lots of money. Nothing new there I suppose. Sigh. We're on our own.

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Hi spati,
I ran into this problem as well. Seems like something funky going on with iBooks 3. Anyways, I had to tweak my read-aloud clip starts in the smil. Where the word was not highlighting, I added a few milliseconds to the timing until the word started highlighting again. Not the most ideal solution, and not sure what exactly causes it because 90% of the words were just fine, but it seemed to fix the problem. Note prior to the problem happening, I had all my clip start timings = clip end timings for the previous word, so there were no gaps.
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no way really?
If this is not true can someone tell me what the client needs to do in order to open an ibooks store account if the client is in Europe?
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thats the first question, second one is the client registered with lulu.com and gave me her log in and password to upload the books from there, if you know lulu they are agrigators and allow you to upload books for publication on all publishers like B&N , Amazon and Apple.
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lucky5 wrote:
Wow Ann...why so nasty?
Im with Ann on this one. The misspelling of "poll" to "pole" gave the thread an entirely new meaning. I did however understand that he "hopefully" meant "poll" but you can never tell. And sometimes, posts are written without the best grammar in the world.

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There are third party apps* for this, but they lock you into their format and don't support every thing that a native FXL Indesign epub export does. Doing all the work manually for creating the SMIL file and marking the audio, etc. Is just way to hard and easy to fail at for most of us.
MANY publishers want this feature! PLEASE I beg of you, nobody can put their massive coding muscles behind such an effort like Adobe. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE consider adding an easy read-aloud margin function to the InDesign suite?
I would even pay extra for this. On bended knee, I beg you.
Aquafadas = inscrutable instructions. Expensive. French. (Can't be bothered to help customers.)
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Please?

There are third party apps* for this, but they lock you into their format and don't support every thing that a native FXL Indesign epub export does. Doing all the work manually for creating the SMIL file and marking the audio, etc. Is just way to hard and easy to fail at for most of us.
MANY publishers want this feature! PLEASE I beg of you, nobody can put their massive coding muscles behind such an effort like Adobe. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE consider adding an easy read-aloud margin function to the InDesign suite?
I would even pay extra for this. On bended knee, I beg you.
Aquafadas = inscrutable instructions. Expensive. French. (Can't be bothered to help customers.)
CircularFLO = easier read-aloud, but LAME-O animations, won't support InDesign animations. (Also no support. And they definitely do not want you guys to see their code.)
Please?

Read aloud

I'd like to set the option read aloud to spanish language! I need your help! Thank you so much! Contact me to [email protected]

Yes, you can add read aloud to a completed iBook but you will need to add code (XML) to it. Here are some links on how to do it.
MAKING A FIXED LAYOUT BOOK:
http://authoradventures.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-to-create-fixed-layout-ibooks-p art.html
HOW TO PUT READ ALOUD INTO A FIXED LAYOUT BOOK:
http://www.elizabethcastro.com/epub/
http://www.amazon.com/Read-Aloud-iBooks-Elizabeth-Castro/dp/1611500176
She is the only person right now who actually tells you step by step how to do it. I bought her book from Barns and Noble (but you have to order it because its a print on demand book). Its great and the only book I could find on the subject.
Also, if you don't want to touch code at all, this site called Kitepress will do it for you. They even send it to itunes for you and put it on Amazon for you too and do a little promotion by putting your book under their publishing name so all books link to ones made using Kitepress. (Don't know if this is good or not but something to think about) But they take a percentage out of any of your profit when you sell it.
http://www.franklinjr.net/kitepress/kitepress-how-it-works/
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2. I know that I need a XML SMIL compatable text editor (BBedit is the only one I heard is free and good). But where do I begin? Is there some kind of template of code where I just add in the code to get the book to read from audio files? If I edit the epub file, will this book still be able to be sent to the iPad through ibooks Author for a preview?
3. I am familiar with Audacity so the audio part is doable. But the coding is scaring me. To add a word by word reading for the ibook requires more programming.
4. Tell me a short list of what I need to do in order. I have all this information but its overwhelming because I hate programming. (I tried making an iphone app and gave up because it required Xcode, which is way out of my league). I don't know where to start from my finished iBook so what is the next thing I need to do?
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Tutorials on creating read aloud epubs

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