It's unfortunate. I benefit greatly from having audio playing along while I read complex nonfiction. The only way I know of to get audio recordings of a textbo

It's unfortunate. I benefit greatly from having audio playing along while I read complex nonfiction. The only way I know of to get audio recordings of a textbook (other than brain-melting text-to-speech) is to....record it yourself. Unfortunately, after recording audiobooks of a couple of 900-page textbooks I lost my enthusiasm. It would be great if there was a community of people doing this, and we could share the burden. I can't imagine it hurting the publisher's bottom-line, as the audio of a textbook is pretty useless without the diagrams and tables and such, so you need the book anyway. If textbooks came with decent audio editions, outline notes, and Anki decks linked to page numbers it would be awesome. I could see it coming from a publisher like NoStarch, but Elsevier, no way that's happening. It would be a good deal for the publishers too, since students don't seem to really buy/read the books anymore as they've ballooned up to hundreds of dollars and thousands of pages of crap to slog through. I'd love to see a textbook that's actually designed for the 21st century in some way other than adding a DRM-wrapped digital edition with a couple extra videos and figures!