Using the Read Aloud and EPUBReader Google Chrome extensions, I created an automated e-book reader of sorts. My hope was that it could take over Children of Dune narration; my 2008 Scott Brick / Simon Vance audiobook from the library had expired and I still had a few chapters to go.
Getting it all set up took some effort and I had to find many workarounds.
First off, the formatting of EPUBReader was less than ideal (you had to go with either four columns or one), but I could live with it. Next off, in my ePub file the whole story was marked as a single chapter. The fact that you could select specific text to read with Read Aloud helped greatly.
Most frustratingly, the extensions icon of Read Aloud kept on disappearing and re-appearing while it was reading. The constant shifting of the icons was highly distracting; eventually I was able to get around it by going fullscreen. (This was less than ideal because it made the text formatting even worse, but it was preferable to the constant shifting.)
Needless to say, the experience was nowhere as pleasant as the human-read audiobook, but it was surprisingly not bad. I ended up finishing Children of Dune text only, but for future e-books, Read Aloud + EPUBReader might be utilized.
