You may well wonder why you should make minidisks of your book, when you already have CDs and excellent MP3 players.

One good reason is that a minidisk player is easily carried in the pocket, while the disks themselves are small and well protected from the environment. This makes them ideal for leaving around in the car, or for taking with you when travelling.

I have been working recently with an Aiwa minidisk player that also has recording capability using software that converts your mp3 speech files into its own format, atrac3, and then transfers them from your computer to the disk. Furthermore it is cheap, and I bought mine for only 34 gbp at Morgan’s. It makes very good recordings, always provided of course that the original mp3 files are as good as you can make them. Two other nice things about this player are that it plays for a long time on a single AA cell, which can be a rechargeable one; and also that its earphone socket is the standard 3.5 mm. Why do I mention this? Because my otherwise very nice 2-gigabyte mp3 player does not have the standard earphone socket, so that without a special little bit of audio cable it cannot be played into the car’s audio system.

So what is the downside? I suppose there are really four of them. One is that the conversion from mp3 to atrac3 is by no means fast, and the transfer from the desktop to the minidisk in the device is not fast either. However, both of these tasks take predictable amounts of time, so the machine can be left to get on with it, while you do something else, returning at the time you have worked out to be suitable. If you decide to re-record the book you have to go through all this again.

Another downside is that for almost any book you will require at least three disks to hold it. Each disk holds a little more than five hours of speech. Given that a typical novel is thirteen hours or more you can see that it would need three disks for such a book, meaning also that you would need to make sure you didn’t mislay one of the set.

Another downside is price. I bought ten brand new disks for just under seven gbp, which means that the set of disks for the book cost two to three gb pounds. But a corresponding advantage is that you can re-use old minidisks. I have a few that were made perhaps eight or nine years ago, and they are really awful. Modern text-to-speech programs produce an infinitely better set of speech files. The older ones sound slurred and drunken.

And the final downside is that except for very special orders it would not be possible to make the minidisks of your book into a saleable product. Of course you could do it if the market were big enough, as with music minidisks. Making one or two is the limit, on account of time and also the fact that the copyright protection software may prevent you from making further copies.

But, to sum up, once you have made the minidisks from the very best sets of speech files that you can make, they are a real joy to listen to.

The quality comes from four main sources. One, that all words that may have more than one pronunciation have been correctly marked up in your original text files. Two, that all words that your text=to-speech program gets wrong, have been rectified by “teaching” it how to pronounce these words. Three, that there are suitable delays at punctuation, especially full-stops and at the ends of paragraphs. Four, that the “speaker” is acceptable to you.