The Reading Room

3:57 AM

How can I convert a pdf that I have download to an audiobook? I tried "natural reader" but it says that it cannot read that file.

Bookworm

6:58 AM

0

Q: Why wouid Marlow have "abused the odl church at home for not being a cathedral"?

In Youth: A Narrative, Joseph Conrad writes: “We had fair breezes, smooth water right into the tropics, and the old Judea lumbered along in the sunshine. When she went eight knots everything cracked aloft, and we tied our caps to our heads; but mostly she strolled on at the rate of three miles a...

Rand al'Thor

7:40 AM

@Tsundoku I was thinking about that too, when seeing the other questions about The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes which weren't tagged with the-hunger-games. My feeling is that the Hunger Games tag should be not just strictly for the original three books, but for any literary material set in that universe. Expertise carries over, since the new book wasn't written in a vacuum but specifically as a tie-in to the existing series.

Not sure if I'm being influenced by Science Fiction & Fantasy experience here though, as over there they normally use universe/franchise tags (without using author tags, even).

Tsundoku

9:24 AM

@Randal'Thor We don't have tags such as tolkiens-legendarium for (a specific subset of) Tolkien's works or even henriad for a number of Shakespeare plays that are definitely all in the same "universe". The combination of work and author tags should be sufficient, shouldn't it?

Those SFF guys ... They moved the question Is Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse science fiction? from the main site to meta?? This is not a question about the main site or about a question on the main site.

Napoleon Wilson

Yes, they kinda adopted this practice at some point.

One of the "cute" little oddities that make an SE site "special", I guess. ;-)

Rand al'Thor

9:47 AM

15

Q: Policy on questions about which genre or subgenre a given work is in?

Back in 2011, in a long discussion which I still haven't read through fully to see whether it's up to date, it was decided that genre-classification questions were off-topic. Do we want to revisit or revise this policy? What should our policy be today on genre-classification questions? Note tha...

discussion scope

@Tsundoku I was also wondering if a Tolkien's legendarium tag would be useful for us. It's definitely a clearly defined area of expertise, whereas e.g. the-lord-of-the-rings and the-silmarillion aren't really separate topics of expertise, and questions relating to one often need to be answered using knowledge from the other.

Ditto with the-hunger-games and the-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes. Although I guess I kind of disprove the point by being the top answerer in the-hunger-games (both here and SFF) without having read The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes ...

Tsundoku

That way of looking at works appears to come from fantasy and hardly applies to other literature, so I'm very reluctant to bias the tagging system towards the mostly non-literary way SFF people look at books.

2

Rand al'Thor

Fair enough, and that's why I made a disclaimer.

Tsundoku

10:03 AM

OK.

Rand al'Thor

But then, which questions about tBoSaS / tHG should have just one tag and which should have both? Many questions might be about the fictional world as a whole, potentially drawing on knowledge from both; many questions about one would explicitly invite answers based on the other.

(We had this issue on SFF before creating the tolkiens-legendarium tag in the Big Edit Event of 2017. Lots of questions had all possible Tolkien tags crammed in - lord-of-the-rings, the-hobbit, silmarillion, middle-earth, tolkien - just because people weren't really sure which one would be most appropriate for a universe question or where the answers could come from.)

Napoleon Wilson

On Literature you also have author tags to help with that, though.

It's unlikely for 5 million authors working on a shared universe.

And on the other hand a lot of a scifi/fantasy author's work is usually spent in the same universe.

There's no need for a tolkien and a tolkiens-legendarium tag in the specific example.

The one question per decade that's about Farmer Giles of Ham can likely be ignored manually by the middle-earth enthusiasts.

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor Our tags are based on the works (and authors) asked about in the question, not about what might get cited in the answer. So if a question only asks about The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes but not about the tHG trilogy, there is no need to tag it with the-hunger-games.

One might argue that the universe of The Winter's Tale is a version of the universe in Greene's Pandosto, but we don't create a the-winters-tale-pandosto-legendarium tag for that reason. (I know it's a bad example.)

Similarly, we don't have a universe tag for Shakespeare plays based on Holinshed + plus Holinshed's work.

Or for Milton's Paradise Lost + Paradise Regained. Or for Homer's Iliad + Odyssey + Virgil's Aeneid (+ plus other works using the same source).

Creating universe tags for fictional universes would be what Germans call a ~~"Spezialwurst"~~ Extrawurst ("custom sausage") just for fantasy readers.

So my arguments against universe tags boil down to the following: (1) they seem specific to fantasy and science fiction, while literature is so much more, and (2) it assumes a non-literary way of approaching literary works, while understanding fiction involves much more than that.

@Knight PDF is not a great format to convert into other formats; it's much better to start from the file from which the PDF was generated. PDF is particularly bad as a source format for an audiobook if it wasn't properly tagged (i.e. structure and certain other "metadata" weren't part of the conversion); also PDF files may be protected against modifications or copying.

Rand al'Thor

10:39 AM

@NapoleonWilson Hmm, granted.

It does happen (rarely) that different authors work in a shared universe, and (less rarely) that a single author may write in many different fantasy worlds. But I guess we have few enough questions that these issues are easily handled.

@Tsundoku Fair. And if it's a question about the world both stories are set in, or a character who appears in both, then it's easy enough to add both tags. In the same way as we can add both jane-eyre and wide-sargasso-sea to a question that invites interpretations from either/both.

Tsundoku

I admit that five tags isn't a high number.

Also, while universe tags assume a specific way of reading fiction, I doubt that the community would readily accept tags based on other ways of reading literary works, e.g. marxist-interpration, feminist-interpretation, structuralist-analysis, or new-historicist-analysis. That these approaches exist has never come up in past discussions on Meta, as far as I can tell. So we just have the very broad intepretation tag.

Napoleon Wilson

10:54 AM

@Tsundoku Extrawurst.

Rand al'Thor

@Tsundoku I'm not sure if we're meaning the same thing by "universe tags" then. Does it assume a specific way of reading fiction, if you ask a question about the geography of Middle-earth without specifying which specific book of Tolkien's legendarium the answer should come from? Or ask a question about the character of Coriolanus Snow without specifying which Suzanne Collins book the answer should come from?

Tsundoku

@NapoleonWilson Thanks. Now it makes more sense.

Rand al'Thor

Come to think of it, I would even say The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is part of the Hunger Games series, a prequel bolted on to the trilogy. We don't normally use tags for individual books in the same series.

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor It assumes that you take the fictional universe seriously as something that can/should be analysed in its own right and usually assumes that universe should be consistent. It ignores many other aspects of reading, i.e. considering how something is told, what it tells us about the work's world view / philosophy etc.

Terry Eagleton talks about this in his book How to Read Literature.

Napoleon Wilson

11:25 AM

@Tsundoku I don't really know if it's as narrow a commitment to "in-universe" interpretation as you make it sound. You can very well ask "literary" questions that span multiple works and profit from that cross-work connection without necessarily comitting to word-of-goddery or universery.

The Ballad thing is likely told in the same way and touches on the same issues as the Hunger thing. And a question analysing these issues across works might deserve a tag summarizing these under a common umbrella term. There's nothing about taking the world too serious or ignoring specific ways of interpretation inherent to that tagging choice.

I understand why you eschew that SF&F approach and maybe "universe tag" is a problematic term in that regard, but you seem to be drawing a few more conclusions from these tags than necessary

Tsundoku

11:51 AM

@NapoleonWilson Yes, you can, but that's not where those universe tags come from.

Tsundoku

12:04 PM

@Bookworm Bilbo’s song of Eärendil in “The Fellowship of the Ring” went HNQ.

Gareth Rees

12:35 PM

I think it's fine to have series tags, for example sherlock-holmes or little-house-series, but the fact that (unlike scifi.se) we have author tags, means that it doesn't add all that much value -- someone who wants to answer Little House questions can just as easily follow laura-ingalls-wilder

Knight

2:00 PM

@Tsundoku I found a book, which is legal to download (as it on internet archive), and it is available in following formats: EPub, Text, Kindle, PDF, PDF with text, and few others. Is it possible that I download in one of these formats and then convert it to an audiobook?

Tsundoku

3:28 PM

@Knight It really depends on how the PDF or the ePub file were generated. Can you see something like a table of contents (not necessarily by default) when you open the PDF file in e.g. Adobe Reader? If yes, you might be able to find a converter that transforms this into an audio book with some structure, so you can navigate the chapters by chapter headings. Otherwise, I think you'll just get a huge chunk of audio without means of orientation.

ePub can have a lot of structure, but not if it was generated from the a flat text file (e.g. a flat text file created by running OCR over a PDF file).

Napoleon Wilson

I can't really imagine a robot doing a particularly good job at reading an audiobook. But maybe I'm just from yesterday.

Tsundoku

3:53 PM

@NapoleonWilson Some TTS engines are actually quite good. I wouldn't use TTS-generated audio for fiction but it can be useful for getting a first impression of non-fiction works.

Blind people use TTS all the time; they crank up the reading speed to more than 500 words per minute, so it doesn't even matter if the voice is robotic.

Napoleon Wilson

Hmm, yes, I guess in non-fiction it's less of a problem.

In times of Alexa and her friends it probably doesn't make sense to imagine it as a book read by Microsoft Sam anymore. ;-)

Knight

4:16 PM

@Tsundoku Yes, it does have table of contents, preface, and other details.

b_jonas

4:52 PM

@Knight Which location? The one right in your profile literature.stackexchange.com/users/8723/knight ? Or maybe you mean where you lived when you were 12th grade?

Rand al'Thor

5:14 PM

@b_jonas By that logic, I'm located in the mysterious city of Unpredictable ;-)

Knight

5:27 PM

What you people do when the book you want to read isn't available in audiobook format?

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor Yes, it would probably be useful if we have more than a few such questions.

Bookworm

0

Q: What's meant here by "follow him even in thought"?

In "The Vampire of the Village" by G. K. Chesterton, the author was describing Father Brown while visiting some persons, saying: The conversation of Miss Carstairs-Carew, on whom he called next, was certainly calculated to paint the parson’s son in the darkest colours. But as it was devoted to b...

meaning short-stories g-k-chesterton

b_jonas

@Knight I don't know, I almost never listen to audiobooks.

The trickier question is, what do you do if it's available only as an audiobook, not as a printed book.

@NapoleonWilson Be careful, that argument used to work well, but now Tolkien also has Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary published.

Napoleon Wilson

Still, how many questions a day will people ask about that thing that the hardcore middle-earthers will get annoyed by them? ;-)

@Knight Then I sadly can't listen to it.

Knight

@b_jonas Don't your eyes pain by reading from book readers? Or do you have printed version of books you read?

b_jonas

5:40 PM

@Knight I mostly read printed books, but I should probably also buy a good book reader eventually.

Apparently there are now questions about Beowulf on all of Sci-Fi SE, Lit SE, and Mythology SE.

Knight

@NapoleonWilson Okay! but reading too much (academic course + hobby) is tiresome

b_jonas

Lit, for some reason, has much more mentions of Beowulf in answers.

@Knight I didn't study law or medicine.

So I didn't have to learn ten thousand pages of nonsense for exams.

Knight

@b_jonas LOL! Exams takes away the charm from every good thing

Napoleon Wilson

@Knight I didn't say I'd read it instead. ;-)

Knight

ROFL

When I was in 9th Grade (2015) we had "Three Men in a boat" as course novel. But exams made even novel like that into something terrible

b_jonas

5:44 PM

@Knight Anyway, it's not too tiresome since I always had the choice to only read good books and discard the ones I don't like. The high school final exam is a possible exception, and I will not tell you which of the books that I was supposed to have read there I actually read.

Rand al'Thor

@Knight I read a serialisation of that in an old magazine.

Knight

@Randal'Thor Oh wow

@NapoleonWilson By the way, Guten Tag

b_jonas

Some of the books that we were required for school are either boring, or were not age-appropriate yet. But that's all old history, I haven't had to concern myself with that after my high school graduation literature mark was confirmed.

That said, yes, Tsundoku probably has a point that a tolkien tag is probably enough.

Knight

@b_jonas The first romantic poem we had was in 9th Grade and if I remember correctly it was Chieftain and the daughter of king, something like that. It was through this poem I got the word "lament"

Gallifreyan

From a Reddit thread asking for "Your profession's dark secret"

b_jonas

5:52 PM

Heck, apparently in addition English Language & Usage SE, English Language Learners, History SE have Beowulf questions, so that's six SE sites. Our site is relatively sparse in Beowulf questions.

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas stackexchange.com/search?q=beowulf

b_jonas

Anyone care to ask one on Christianity SE and Graphics Design SE?

@Randal'Thor Yes, but that finds more than just questions about Beowulf the epic.

It has questions about the recent Beowulf movie, apparently some software thing called Beowulf, and questions or answers that mention the epic but aren't principally about it.

Youtube clearly has more recordings of opera arias sang by Gregor József as when I searched them the previous time. Despite that the new ones I find have been uploaded long ago. I'll have to keep searching and listening, because these are good.

b_jonas

6:10 PM

Wow, there's now even a full video recording of Mozart's Serail with Gregor József. Also, I don't think I've ever heard the ouverture at such a fast tempo. youtube.com/watch?v=Il4fewisjxU

Napoleon Wilson

A lot of the books in school were boring, primarily because they were selected for historic/culutral value and less for entertainment. ;-)

Fortunately I had read one of the books that stood to choose from for the exam. And it wasn't all too terrible either.

I directed my limited efforts to things that seemed interesting like The Sandman or Antigone and jumped over stuff whose summary already made me nod off, like The Reader or Mario and the Magician.

Bookworm

11:11 PM

0

Q: What book of Eugène Sue's 'The Mysteries of the People' inspired M. Joly's 'Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli & Montesquieu', as claimed by U. Eco?

Question summed up: Can anyone help me find the part of Eugène Sue's 'The Mysteries of the People' wherein a sinister Jesuit plot is unveiled, which may have, through a game of 'telephone' by plagiarism, inspired parts of the anti-Semitic forgery, 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?' In one of ...

french-literature translation plagiarism umberto-eco

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