What are read-aloud eBooks?

Read aloud ebooks are an audiobook and an eBook, all backed together in a single download. When reading the eBook, the user can choose to turn on the read aloud function and listen to the audiobook while text is highlighted as it is spoken. There are many studies that show that reading out loud is beneficial both for the reader and for the listenner. Some of the applications of read aloud eBooks are:

• Learning a new language: Many people agree that listenning to a narration in a different language and, at the same time, seeing what words are being spoken helps inmensely when trying to learn and improve their knowledge of that language. This is the perfect companion to formal language classes.
• Improve reading skills of children: One of the benefits to read along with a young one is how much this helps for them to improve their reading and comprehension skills. With read aloud eBooks for children we can ensure that they are exercising their reading and comprehension skills.
• Help focus on the content: Many times it seems like we are reading but we are actually thinking about something else, which makes us have to come back multiple times to read the same passage again. By involving two senses (sight and hearing) we can focus much more on what we are reading. Similarly, dyslexic people can use read aloud books as a help tool to focus on the text they are reading.
• Alternating between reading and listenning: When commuting it is common to alternate between times in which we can read a book peacefully, and others in which we feel more confortable to just listen to the audiobook. With totally synchronized audio and text, read aloud books allow us to seamlessly switch from one to the other without loosing a single word of the content.

Sinkronigo read-aloud eBooks

At Sinkronigo we realized the potential that read aloud ebooks have in helping many different people and decided to develop a catalog of affordable literature classics for all ages.

Our eBooks package orginal texts from literature classics together with human narrations recorded by volunteers and professionals, selected to be pleasant to the ear.

We currently offer two types of read aloud eBooks, reader and parallel, suitable for different use cases:

• Sinkronigo learner: In these eBooks each word in the text is highlighted as it is spoken. These are perfect to learn a new language as it becomes very clear where in the audio each word starts and ends. These are also great to make the reading experience easy and enjoyable, as the text is "speaking" to you. In most of our eBooks we add a highlight selector in the first page, so that you can change to your preferred text highlighting or even turn off the highlighting and just listen to the audio as you freely read the text.
• Sinkronigo parallel: These eBooks are bilingual versions, with text in two languages. In addition, one of the languages contains the audio narration and we even included a sentence-level highlighting where each sentence (and its translation) are highlighted as they are spoken. These eBooks are the evolution of paper-based bilingual eBooks, including audio and a help to know sentence correspondences between languages.