Virtual Reading?

[Kieran.]

If there were a program in which you could read books or magazines on your computer, would you use it, or would you much prefer to go out and buy literature and read it traditionally?

Or would you not mind and do both?

[Maximilianus]

Do you mean programs to read e-books or audio books? If so, there are quite a bunch of such programs already. Now, if you mean automated reading, that is, one of those programs that imitate the human voice and read a piece of text aloud in a still rather robotic tone, well, that technology (I think) has still a long way to go in development. There has been some progress in the field though, but I think it would be really difficult for a machine to really reproduce the human voice with complete accuracy. All that considered, robotic voices sound funny and sometimes entertaining, like those sci-fi TV shows of the sixties featuring talking robots :p