Hi all,
Tobi can (re)import text-only as well as text+audio EPUB3 and DAISY talking books (both standards are based on SMIL, but use different XML document formats: HTML5 versus DTBOOK). The SMIL text-audio synchronisation data is indeed preserved during the import process (i.e. when creating a new Tobi project).
As correctly stated though, the DTBOOK / HTML5 markup cannot be edited directly from within the application, making it hard to adjust the synchronisation granularity "on the fly" / at authoring time (e.g. split a large paragraph into several sentences, or even down to the word level for children read-aloud books). We have plans to introduce granularity control / structure editing, early next year. Until then, painstaking roundtrip export+reimport is the only workaround. We generally advise to "prepare" the text structure in advance (which is quite a common practice in production workflows), but we totally appreciate the need for built-in structure editing, and we will address this caveat.
As for Media Overlays reading systems: the Readium Chrome plugin is currently useful, but not completely satisfactory (e.g. missing previous-next audio navigation, tap-to-play, skippability support, etc. ... features which are also lacking in iBooks and others). Fortunately, great progress is being made in the Readium SDK (the aforementioned shortcomings are already fixed), so hopefully these improvements will shortly be available in the Readium Chrome extension (or more likely: in the Readium-Web library).
Feel free to use the
http://daisy.org/tobi forum if you encounter problems when using Tobi, we do monitor user feedback and queries there.
Cheers, daniel