I kind of need your help with this technical matter. Let’s say, there is a nice (audio)book that I want to listen to and read along in LingQ.
Where and how would I need to buy them so I can quickly and without a lot of difficulties import them into LingQ?
Or if there is a free audibook-version on YouTube but I still need to buy the book, how would I combine them?
Or, if I found the text but I want to buy an audiobook to listen along?
As an example: I have tried to import Albert Camus - l’Étranger. I found several PDF versions of the book and I found good Audiobooks as well, all for free. But converting the book pdf into EPUB or .txt to load it into LingQ caused problems. (hyphens, spaces, accents were off). On top of that, it doesn’t seem easy to synchronize text and audio.
Even if I managed to create a lesson for myself like this, it seems like a lot of trial an error and a lot of work. Even if I manage to to it for one book, the next book might be in a different format or I might need to get the audiobook from somwhere else…
I want to keep using LingQ but this extra step (or these several extra steps) of having to find the right version of everything, converting everything and then the import still not working well is what is keeping me from using LingQ to the extend I would like.
How do you guys do it? If you have a book you want to read? How to you import it into LingQ? Maybe I just haven’t found the right system for me.
I haven’t had any trouble importing PDF, EPUB and TXT books into LingQ, including L’Etranger. Occasionally there are mistakes that look like OCR problems or French double-quotes appearing on the next line and periods as in F.B.I. throwing off the sentence calculation.
However, synchronizing audio and text is a difficult problem that I wouldn’t expect LingQ to handle well. Judging by the frequent complaints here, many people have such problems.
I stick with the LingQ computer voices in Sentence View. They are good enough, though not as good as human voices.
I usually import just the book and then have a separate browser window open on desktop to listen to the audio - usually using a service like Audible or finding the audio on YouTube or Spotify.
I thought LingQ can import a pdf as is (i.e. you don’t need to convert to EPUB first). I could be wrong.
In the past I’ve bought books on kindle and used calibre to unlock. I’m not sure this is possible anymore. I do think some folks are still successful with epubor ultimate being able to unlock kindle books as well.
I’ve turned away from purchasing any book on Amazon Kindle that I intend to import into Lingq. They just don’t want to play nice and I’d rather not support them if I can avoid it for these. I now buy my books off a german book store site that sells them in epub format and they import easily into Lingq in my experience so far.
So I would look into finding a non U.S. based online ebook seller that sells books in epub format. If you’re interested in French…then a French ebook seller, or maybe even Canada? Maybe see if there is a free or cheap book from them just to verify if there’s any DRM issues…although so far with epub I haven’t seen any issues.
For the audio, you’re looking at way too much work in my opinion. Buy it on audible or wherever you can find it and listen to it through whatever app supports playback and record the listening time manually in Lingq (if you want to keep track) . If you want to read while listening, read in LingQ and listen outside of LingQ.
BTW…I suggest testing on a cheap book if you can. Some may have a DRM that doesn’t allow the import. There are sometimes ways to remove the DRM, but I don’t know the latest and greatest even for the epub types of DRM. I think these are often done with Adobe Digital Editions. I just tried uploading an epub that I got from an online library and it didn’t allow it. Something like epubor ultimate as mentioned before might be able to handle this, or there may be another way to strip the drm through a calibre plugin.