Listening and editing

[ltlredwagon]

I'm sure my great ignorance will become apparent once I start to write, but I will try to be clear. I will say what I want to do and then hopefully someone can tell me if I can do it and how. I have both an older MacBook Pro running Sierra, and a new MacBook Pro running Catalina.

1. I want to buy a book online that I download to my computer. The book would reside on my computer, not anywhere else. Not interested in having a library in the cloud, etc. Not interested in having an "account" with some company.
2. My computer will read the book to me. However, I want the book to be in a format which allows me to copy and paste. If I decide I love paragraphs 2-4 on p. 137 I can highlight these paragraphs and copy them into a Word file, Text file, etc.
3. I want to be able to do the same on my iPhone. I want to be able to put the book on my iPhone and have my phone read the book to me. And I want to be able to highlight text and copy and paste into Notes.

I can currently do this decently. For example, I downloaded a pdf version of Book 1 of Gulag Archipelago in pdf form. My Mac ("Alex" is my preferred voice) can read this to me. I can highlight and copy and paste sections into Word. I can also drop this pdf file into Voice Dream on my iPhone and Voice Dream will read it to me. I have rewind and ff options which are nice. And with Voice Dream I can highlight and copy and paste sections into Notes. So, this is somewhat workable for pdf books. And there are a huge number of pdf books available which I can obtain from a wide variety of sources.

"Alex" (on computer and iPhone) does a pretty good job of reading. But I suppose better would be audio books with text, read by a professional reader. Is there an app I can use on my Mac desktop and iPhone that will do the same thing? Professional audio reading, as text scrolls by, with the option of highlighting text and copying and pasting text into Word?

Appreciate any comments.

[Quoth]

ePub.
A PDF is a sort of envelope, it might not actually have text. It's really either a facsimile of a paper document or an electronic proof to create one.

Calibre on the Mac to organise, edit, convert and export ebooks. I export badly formatted ones as RTF and then fix styles and headings in LO Writer using native odt format. I save an extra copy in docx for Calibre to make an epub. I make other formats from the epub.

The Calibre ebook reading app is also good. Should be able to work with Text to Speech.

[ltlredwagon]

Thanks Quoth. Much appreciated. I will check out Calibre and LO Writer.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by ltlredwagon

"Alex" (on computer and iPhone) does a pretty good job of reading. But I suppose better would be audio books with text, read by a professional reader. Is there an app I can use on my Mac desktop and iPhone that will do the same thing? Professional audio reading, as text scrolls by, with the option of highlighting text and copying and pasting text into Word?

To the best of my knowledge the Amazon/Audible/Whispersync ecosystem is the only one that does this; but of course you can't access that without making an account with the company. I'm not sure how you can access any professional non-public-domain audiobook without making an account with some company (or library), short of stealing them.

[ltlredwagon]

Thanks very much Meeera. I will look into this.