If you read a lot of Hubs, or do a lot of reading on the internet period, you're probably finding that it can be pretty hard on the eyes, and take up a lot of your time. There's a great way to turn Hubs and webpages into spoken-word MP3 files that you can listen to on your computer or iPod. There are programs out there that can do this with essentially any text you can access on your computer, from webpages like HubPages Hubs, to ordinary webpages, to PDF documents. If you're:

• Someone who reads - or would like to read - a lot of Hubs
• A student with a lot of coursework
• Someone who does a lot of research on the internet
• An employee who must read a lot of documents
• Learning a lot of new stuff for a hobby, like a new computer programming language
• Someone who reads a lot of Wikipedia articles to build your understanding of the world around you
• Just plain fed up with the system and trying to learn what you need to know to get out of it or reform it,

then you need to know how to get all those words into a spoken format you can listen to on your computer or iPod. You could be reading during your commute or lunch hour, while you're catching rays at the beach or the park, or even just getting up from your computer and going hiking in the fresh air to improve your health.

There are many text-to-speech programs out there that will read printed text out loud to you, but only recently has the technology to read them well, and programs to convert them automatically into a standard MP3 audio file rather than just sending the results to your speakers, emerged. There are now many text-to-MP3 programs out there. I like to use TextAloud because it can be set to convert many text files into MP3s in one process - you simply tell it which files you want it to convert, you get it going, and then leave it to do its thing. Go off and eat dinner or something, and when you get back you'll have brand-new MP3s you can listen to on your computer or transfer to your iPod or other MP3 player to take with you wherever you go.

If you're ready to listen to HubPages while you're out and about, and want to give it a go, I'll take you through it. I'll be focussing on using TextAloud, since it's powerful and easy for novices to pick up. You'll need to download it first, and I've made sure to include it as a keyword in this Hub so that it will show up in the ads on this page, and clicking on it should take you right to it. Download TextAloud now and go through the standard install process, and then come back to this article and I'll take you through how to use it.

After downloading and installing TextAloud, run it for the first time and it will check to make sure you already have the basic files (called speech APIs) installed that your computer will need to turn text into speech. If you don't have it already, it will give you a link to right where you need to go to install it from Microsoft. Later on, you may want to get some better voices. AT&T's Natural Voices are very good, and Acapela and RealSpeak also have good voices on offer. But for now, the standard voices (Mike, Mary and Sam) will show you what you can do with this.

Run TextAloud, and if it tells you to install the Speech API, click the link and do that, restarting TextAloud when you have. Now, run TextAloud again and dismiss the tips it gives you on startup - you may or may not want to turn them off altogether by ticking the box that's showing. With TextAloud up and running, switch over to something with text in it (an open text file, or even your web browser) and highlight some text. Copy that text into your clipboard (Ctrl + C), and if it's more than 10 characters long TextAloud will notice and ask you, "Copy Clipboard to speech buffer?". By default, TextAloud will overlook snippets of text that are very short, so that it doesn't bother you with things you probably don't want it to read. Click the New button, and it will show you what you've got. You can re-do this, selecting different snippets of text until you've got what you want. Then you can select a different voice, and either have it "Speak" or "Speak to File" by clicking on the appropriate buttons. It will ask you where to save the resulting MP3 - tell it someplace you can easily find (like your Desktop), and off you go!

I found that the results the first time were prety shabby, but that wasn't TextAloud's fault - it saved it in a very tiny file format that didn't take up a lot of space on my drive, but it didn't sound spectacular either. I went into the menu (Options -> Voices and File Options -> File Options) and boosted the quality to 256kps at 48 kHz, and it sounded a lot better.

Want to hear what this sounds like? I've made you some samples! I used AT&T's Mike and Crystal Natural Voices to read things out into MP3, and uploaded them onto the web for you to hear!

• Here's a snippet from Pam Grundy's Lehman Brothers Hub.

It's also easy to combine Hubs with music! I took that sample, and went into a sound editor (GoldWave and SoundForge are great for this - in this case, I used SoundForge). I opened it up and used the Paste Mix command to set it to music

• The same clip, set to music!

It's easy to do this with entire Hubs. You can pull down the Edit menu in your browser, choose Select All, and work with TextAloud - even editing out things like Comments and the like from the top or bottom of the text, right from TextAloud's text window. When you're happy with it, tell it to Speak to File and off you go!

Whether it's a Hub or another webpage, this will allow you to listen to them in your spare time without straining your eyes, and easily load them onto your iPod or other MP3 player so that while you're commuting, you can be reading! If you'd like to experiment with this, I took a very interesting article from John E. Trumane and encoded it to MP3 format you can download and listen to on your computer or your iPod. Throw it on your iPod, and you can listen to it next time you're out and sitting around bored somewhere.

So now that you can listen to Hubs and other webpages while you're out, what does this mean? Well, as a society we've gotten away from the printed word a lot - we can do a lot more reading, not just news but learning - stuff that will educate us politically and socially, and we'll be well-read again. Musicians can easily quote the printed word in their creations - imagine writing a Hub, and finding yourself quoted as a sample in a song someone composed! Once you put something on the 'net, it's out there... it could turn up anywhere.

Text-to-MP3 software has some phenomenal implications for HubPages authors in particular. We have so many Hubs here on HubPages, but there's a time investment involved for people when they decide whether or not to sit through reading them. But if it's time they'll just be wasting while they're commuting anyway, and can have the Hub read to them - why not? Making your Hubs available in audio format has another plus as well - you can put them up on standard MP3-based music services like Last.fm. and a whole new audience will be able to discover them. Because it isn't a lot of reading, they'll be more likely to listen to them - and Last.fm not only has its own audience eagerly looking for something new, Last.fm will host your MP3s for you, letting readers listen to either 30-second audio samples of your Hubs, the whole thing, or download them - it's your choice. Finally, Last.fm will allow you to make more money with your Hubs, because it shares revenue with you as HubPages does. A 30% share of the revenue whenever someone listens to one of your Hubs, and a 10% share when one of your Hubs is played on their free radio service. Imagine if you got paid every time someone simply read one of your Hubs! By making spoken-word MP3s from your Hubs and putting them on Last.fm, you can make more money from the Hubs you already have by sharing them with a whole new audience. Oh, and Last.fm pays through PayPal, which makes things very simple.