Audiobooks for Education: The Rise of Text-to-Speech Textbooks

Audiobooks have had a tremendous positive impact on the community in general. One of the major reasons is that text-to-speech textbooks can be conveniently listened to in case the learner is unable to sit down and read.

Did you know that 53% of the adults in the USA listened to audiobooks early in 2023? Audiobooks enable the doubtful reader to engage with books by way of listening to them; they have reinvigorated the concept of “reading,” albeit in a completely different form.

Let’s now look at how the rise of audiobooks has impacted education.

Table of Contents

I. Modernization With Text-to-Speech Textbooks

II. 6 Key Ways Audiobooks Have Transformed the Way Learning Works

1. Accelerated Production
2. Diversity Inclusive Experience
3. High Engagement
4. Consistency
5. Non-Stop Narration
6. Multilingual Learning

III. KITABOO: Creating Audiobooks With High Engagement and Impact

What fuels the throttle that the audiobook market is experiencing? The answer is simple: digitality.

Data says that there are about 6.4 billion cell network subscribers in the world, meaning that this chunk of the population has easy access to content like audiobooks.

Audiobooks have managed to modernize the experience of reading for the new-age demographic. It has helped make bookish content more consumable by way of effective narration, listening to which is more engaging than having to read lengthy text.

Even more so, where education is concerned, driving engagement has always been a challenge. However, with the use of text-to-speech textbooks, it is possible to achieve high levels of student participation and contribution to learning.

A survey found that out of the 46% of listeners who consumed spoken-word media every day were listening to audio content like audiobooks for an average of 2 hours and 19 minutes daily. The same survey also indicated that it has caused a major shift in the revenue strategies of publishers as well.

The education industry runs on student attention and engagement, and audiobooks provide more avenues to connect with them and help them learn better.

This has given rise to the need for digital publishers like KITABOO to provide authors with text-to-speech textbook creation tools that provide multiway benefits like making inclusive content, easy production, and more.

Specifically for the education industry, audiobooks have pioneered drastic learning transformation in six pivotal ways.

Let’s see what they are:

Text-to-speech (TTS) technology is extremely easy to implement for text that already exists in a digital form. Educators can use the readily available TTS conversion software online and implement it in all the curriculum eBooks.

This entire activity can be completed within a matter of minutes to provide students with an option to listen to the lesson instead of reading it. It is particularly helpful for the disengaged learner who finds it hard to focus while reading.

An inclusive classroom implements several learning methods that allow all the students to progress through a lesson equitably. Leveraging audiobooks is one of the ways education has come a long way in including a wider base of students in a learning program.

Especially the students who have unavoidable reading comprehension issues, or for those who are unable to concentrate on the lesson while reading, audiobooks are an excellent alternative. They help such students retain not just their self-confidence while learning but also the knowledge gained for a longer period.

For younger students, audiobooks can generate high levels of engagement. This is because when they are just learning to read, their minds are not attuned to handling wordiness, which can hinder their comprehension capacity.

The students then become disengaged throughout the downstream learning process that comes after reading.

On the other hand, audiobooks retain engagement through the introduction of dynamic, expressive narration that keeps the students hooked to listening. It gives them the opportunity to read along with the narrator and understand the lesson better.

Selecting specific AI-based voices for text-to-speech textbooks establishes consistency of narration in audiobooks. It is pivotal to maintain the same tone and diction throughout the learning process to prevent confusion about the content in students’ minds.

This is especially applicable to language lessons that incorporate the subtle nuances of pronunciation and other spoken aspects of a language. Educators can prevent inconsistencies by providing one standard TTS voice for a language (or any other) audiobook that represents the content perfectly.

Consider the following two scenarios:

Scenario 1

The students engage with a book only when their teacher is reading the lesson aloud to them. The lecture runs for 10 minutes before the teacher has to take a break, which results in an inevitable disengagement from the lesson for the entire class.

Scenario 2

The students are provided with an audiobook to listen to in their own time. They listen to the audiobook while they ride the bus or while they are at home, studying. The narration is continuous and engaging, which keeps the students hooked. They even come up with certain queries about the lesson, which the teacher then addresses in the next class.

These scenarios are a clear indication that with text-to-speech textbooks, there is less opportunity for disengagement from learning because of continuous narration. This plays a vital role in improving how learning is delivered.

Text-to-speech textbooks are especially helpful in classrooms that have students from multiple nationalities learning about the same topic. Digitality has helped bring the world closer, and TTS technology in education is helping remove language barriers through audiobooks.

The learners have the option to listen to the lecture in the language they find more comfortable learning in, regardless of the language the book has been written in. TTS technology helps remove the language barrier, making learning more accessible for students who would rather engage with a book in a tongue they are familiar with.

The undisputed benefits of audiobooks make them a handy tool to improve learning outcomes for educators who are looking to enhance student engagement. Additionally, audiobooks are a great way to level the playing field for all learners alike.

By using the KITABOO digital publishing platform, educators can produce text-to-speech textbooks with multiple modernized features that enhance learning. For example, the introduction of multilingual TTS capabilities, in addition to animations and gamification, helps create a thoroughly engaging audiobook that is interactive as well.

Try KITABOO for all your audiobook publishing needs today.