MultiReader for Android

An interesting product, MultiReader utilizes text-to-speech to read your eBooks from the following formats (DRM files need not apply):

• text
• pdf
• doc
• ppt
• rtf
• epub

What's fascinating is that it appears the TTS is offloaded to the Internet. It seems to offer the built in (as of Android 1.6 or later) text-to-speech engine, but also have the ability to upload the text to servers for conversion to speech, and then stream it back down to you as audio. Servers include:

• vozMe
• AT&T
• Voice Forge
• NextTens

In addition to netting many voice options for English, Spanish, German, French and Italian, it also opens up TTS to native speakers of Portugese, Russian and Dutch - something you can't do with the built in synthesis.

At $4.95 it's an interesting app, and appears to link right to Project Gutenberg in addition to playing books you side load onto Android via USB. Add in a little DRM love and it might just become a killer app, although I wonder how publishers would feel about that, given Amazon's position to turn of text-to-speech at a publisher's whim.