I took the holiday opportunity to experiment with these. I originally tried ElevenReader (at an LLM’s suggestion). After an hour of two listening, however, I got frustrated with how it would get stuck in footnotes or citational paraphernalia, as the parser for the PDFs I uploaded didn’t do a particularly good job of navigating the page structure.
At another LLM’s suggestion, I switched to Paper2Audio, which I am finding much more congenial. I had originally wanted to listen to Tommaso Astarita’s Between Salt Water and Holy Water: A History of Southern Italy: but the free version of Paper2Audio puts a limit on the number of pages in the PDF you can transcribe to audio, so I settled on Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason.
I’ve been meaning to read Weizenbaum in full for a while, but I’ve never quite found the time. Because I have a heap of dense and theoretical reading to do for my PhD, I usually prioritize this when I’m with my reMarkables. The attention required for audiobooks is of a different nature, however, and it turned out that Weizenbaum’s style of writing is just about right for what I can cognize via audio at the moment. I listened through about 50% of the book, mostly while running.