title_body: What is a good software for reading ebooks out loud? I enjoy having the ebooks read out loud. My previous solution has always been to highlight the chapters I want to read and then turn on voiceover in Adobe Reader on my Mac. The advantage is that I can select from all sorts of voices and control the pitch and speed. The disadvantage is that it sometimes takes quite a bit of time to highlight things and subtitles and page numbers often get read out as well, interrupting my reading.
  
  I just tried iBooks and although .epub files read marvellously, it doesn't read .pdf files.
  
  Is there any software that is available that can read ebooks out loud, preferably one that works for pdf files and lets me control pitch and speed? I would like to have books read aloud to me on my (google) tablet, especially as most of the books I'm reading are textbooks and don't have audiobook versions.
upvoted_answer: There are several screen readers available, these are high end products used by totally blind and visually impaired user to operator a computer.  JAWS is preferred by all the blind computer users I know.  According to this there is a version designed specifically for tablets.  
  
  Be aware, the creators of PDF documents, often do so without consideration for screen readers.  PDF is used to create fixed format document for the a sighted reader to look at.  Even if there is text for a screen reader to read it is often difficult for a screen reader to translate it in to a helpful format.
  
  If the PDF file is actually a scanned image of a printed page, Jaws will not be able to read it.  There is software called OCR that is able to "read" pictures of words and convert them to a text layer that JAWS, or MS word, etc can consume.  
  
  Lastly if the PDF is laid out with lots of columns, boxes, images, cute little conversation bubbles, etc, it will be extremely difficult for any program to translated it into something meaningful to you. 
  
  Calibre has an option that will convert PDF to most ebook formats, there is a listing here of some of the issue you may encounter.