Down to Earth But Heavenly Minded

I just finished republishing 35 brief book reviews (each less than 5-minutes long) by Jim McKendrick. He made a comment about out of print writings from the past. And then it talked about a publisher re-publishing some of them, mentioning how important it is to have some of these old writing available for this generation. When he said this, it made me realize Why I do what I do.

What I have been doing for the five years is re-publishing old writhings in audio format, but I have been going beyond just audio and making them into a video with the text.

A short time ago, I came up with the idea of publishing the text on my blog first, so that is what I have been doing. Let me explain the process so if someone once to continue doing what I am doing, they will understand how I do what I do.

Before I go into detail, let me say that with the technology we have today, it is much easier to publish on the Internet and not have the expense of printing. Awhile back, I started publishing ebooks on Amazon and Google play, and I still have some out there, but I found I had to charge for them, and this is not what I wanted to do. I wanted to make them free for all to read or listen to. 

Okay, how I do this and why? I spent a lot of time looking for a good digital voice to read text. When I first started, the voices were not the best, and as time went on, things keep improving. I was also looking for easier ways to edit text to convert to audio. Digital voices do not read text perfectly like humans, but, again, this is getting better. I ran into people that said they didn’t like to listening to digital voices. I can understand that, that is why I am also making re-publications available in text as well as audio.

In my search for pleasant voices, I found that Microsoft Edge browser, which uses Immersive Reader, had some pleasant voices, but again, I ran into a problem. You see, I don’t use Windows as an operating system and Edge is the browser that comes with Windows. I’m a Linux guy, and that’s all I use. Well, Microsoft came out with the Edge browser for Linux, but trying to use it with the Immersive Reader did not work well. I was back to square-one. After more searching, I found an older version of the Edge browser and Immersive Reader would work.

Special note: This older version is no longer available. I am glad I still have a copy of the install program in storage, and have had to install it several times so I am glad I keep a copy of the installer.

Now the Immersive Reader will read web pages, but not all of them. I started using Google Docs with the reader, but then Microsoft made so kind of change and that stopped working. Again, I was back to square-one. This was getting frustrating, relying on outside sources that kept breaking. This led me to where I am right now.

By posting all the old writings on my blog, I found I solved a couple of problems. I have made all the writings available to those who want to just read, and Immersive Reading work great with my blog for recording audio.

Moving on to the next step in how I do what I do. I create covers for all my publications using Canva online. Next, I create a text post on my blog making all the edits using a spell and grammar checker, then copying and pasting it into the blog. After publishing the blog post, I open it in the Edge browser and switch to Immersive Reader. The next step involves recording the video and audio.

I use a program called OBS for the recording. As I have Immersive Reader in Edge read the text from the blog post, I record it in OBS. I then take the video file and upload it to YouTube, Bitchute, Spotify, and Ugetube.

If you are listening to this recording, you will hear the digital voice I am using to read this article to you. Let me know what you think, and if you have any suggestions to improve this process.

I have had people suggest I just read and record them, but with close to 14,000 videos online, it would be too hard for me to do this. I have read some, but I could never have read all these old writings. 

One more thing before closing, if you know of some out of print Christian writings online that you would like to have in audio format, let me know where I can find them and I will check to see if they are worthy of re-publishing.

The reason I am doing all this work to get these old writings out here is so other Christians will have them for years to come. 

By Irving W Risch