Every book I publish also goes up on YouTube as a free read-along. The full text scrolls slowly up the screen while a voice reads it, with the current line held in a soft reading band. It’s an audiobook and an ebook at once, and anyone can watch it free.
Why give the books away
I write about difficult ideas: why numbers keep secrets, what difficulty costs, how computers came to be. I’d rather those ideas reach people than sit behind a price. Some readers want to own a copy, and the Kindle and paperback editions are there for them. Others want to try a book on a lunch break or listen while they drive. The read-along serves both, and hearing and seeing the words together helps the harder chapters land.
How they’re made
Each video comes out of the same open-source pipeline on my Linux laptop. The book’s text is set in type and rendered as one tall page. A local text-to-speech voice reads it at an unhurried pace, and the page scrolls in time with the narration. The audio is leveled across the whole book so no chapter jumps out louder than the rest, and chapter markers let you skip around. Long books run to several hours and are split into volumes.
Watch
The read-alongs include The Real Gatekeeper, The Wall at Two, Preservation and Horizons, The Rooms That Hold Us, The Big Book of Prime Secrets, The Garden That Computes and Light Through the Holes, plus The Free Machine and the Number Country books. Every link is on the Books page.
