Patent ID: 6985913

Claim:
An electronic book apparatus comprising: a display; display control means for causing the display to simultaneously display a plurality of different book titles corresponding respectively to a plurality of books; book selecting means for selecting a desired one of the plurality of books; receiving means for requesting an external book delivery system to deliver data electronically to the book apparatus, and for receiving the data from the external book delivery system, said data including a text of the selected desired book which includes a plurality of different characters, and images of a plurality of different readers corresponding to voices for reading out relevant parts of the book text; display control means for causing the display to display images of the plurality of characters and the images of the plurality of readers; user-operable allocation means for utilizing the displayed images of the plurality of characters and the displayed images of the plurality of readers to select a reader to correspond to each character of the plurality of characters; display control means for causing the display to display the received book text and the images of the plurality of characters, after the selection of the reader for each of the plurality of characters; and read means for reading out relevant parts of the book text corresponding to the plurality of characters displayed with the book text such that a part corresponding to said each character of the plurality of characters is read out in the voice of the reader selected to correspond to the character.