What is a Digital Talking Book?
Digital talking books are devices that allow readers to not only enjoy an audio recitation of the content of the book, but also allow the user to skip around in the text in search of specific topics or word searches. The books are operated with the use of a digital talking book player, with a series of control keys that allow the reader to maneuver through the text at will. This sets the digital talking book apart from simple audio books that only allow the reader to stop, start, and rewind the book in search of a given point in the presentation. Depending on the level of sophistication of the player and the digital talking book, it may be possible for the reader to perform a variety of functions. Most digital talking book players today will allow readers to go directly to the beginning of a chapter. The ability to set an electronic bookmark can be very handy, as it allows the reader to stop even in the middle of a section or chapter, and pick up at the same spot at a later time. The r
So now lets come back to the main subject of this presentation, the Digital Talking Book or DTB. As George explained earlier, a DTB is simply a set of files which, put together, forms a multimedia document. One file contains the text of the book with all the indexing tags that describe the structure of the book. The indexing is done with the XML mark-up language. A second file contains the audio that has been recorded the same way we’ve done with cassettes, except that now the recording is digitized and probably compressed later on in the production process. Finally you have a SMIL file, which contains the necessary data to synchronize the text and the audio. We could also take some time to discuss in more detail the document type definition, the navigation control center, and the resource file associated with the DTB, but these are not necessary to understand the basic concept. As George also described, these three basic files may include different levels of contents to form different
