Have your iPad read out loud to you

http://lifehacker.com/kindle-for-ios-can-make-siri-read-your-books-aloud-sor-486241369

Have you ever been traveling by car, and wished that you could get your iPad (or iPhone) to read books aloud to you? I was in that situation the other day, and came across this useful article on a "life hack" to do just that. But it's not the article that provided the key information, it was a comment below the article!

Here's the steps (in case you can't/don't want to click on the link):

It's this simple.

1. Go to "Settings", and in the "General" tab, scroll down to "Accessibility" and select it.
2. Scroll to the bottom of that page and find the section that says "Triple-click". Press it, and select "VoiceOver" from the list of options.
3. Now, all you have to do in order to have a page read aloud to you is to triple-click on your home button, and VoiceOver is turned on.
4. In order to have an entire page read aloud, you must simply swipe down with two fingers.
5. Ta-da! You can now hear your ebook read aloud! You can tweak the rate of speech, among other options, in that same settings menu that you were at when you did the Triple-click thing.

Next, go to Kindle or iBooks, open one of your ebooks, triple-click the home button, swipe down with two fingers, and you are good to go! To turn off VoiceOver, simply triple-click the home button again.

I am going to be listening to a textbook as I drive 3.5 hours each way to teach! Shameless plug, here's the blog for the class: http://LGBTQsocialwork.blogspot.com.

Cheers!

BookFinder4u.com - No really, that's all there is to it

http://www.bookfinder4u.com/

For those of us who want to buy really expensive books about concepts and theories and propositions and prepositions... and who also happen to be poor doctoral students, this website is a wonderful time-saver and penny-saver! It searches multiple book seller websites and finds the best price. That isn't my favorite feature of the website, though. If you are anything like me, you know that there are books out there that you'd like to buy, but can't right now. It will save your wishlist, and you can set a price alert so that when the price (total + shipping) is lower than a price you set you will get an e-mail notification. Another feature I like is that the website is clean and has no ad's or filler material. I also find it helpful to look at user reviews of booksellers that I'm not familiar with so that I can start to get an idea of whether it's a trustworthy seller. It also searches for out of print books for you history buffs out there :).

So, head on over www.bookfinder4u.com and create a free account so you can find and save money on the books of your dreams!