Editing Openai/696ee667-0f5c-800f-bff4-40d6fcaaafa7 (section)

=== Assistant: Fair. ===
Fair. Page by page scanning is a special kind of slow torture, especially when you just want the book talking while you drive.

Here is the honest landscape, no fluff.

If you do not want to scan page by page, your only realistic options are:

One: see if an audiobook already exists that you can borrow for free.
Libby and Hoopla through a public library are the big ones. You are not buying it again. You are borrowing a licensed audio copy. This is the least effort, safest, most brain friendly option while driving. If the book exists as audio anywhere, this is the cleanest win.

Two: use a bulk scanning workflow, not manual scanning.
Some apps let you photograph entire chapters quickly or import a PDF if you can get one. This still requires some upfront work, but it is batch based, not page by page listening prep.

For example, apps like Voice Dream Scanner or Speechify allow you to:
• Photograph a stack of pages in one sitting
• Auto detect page edges
• Process everything at once
• Then listen hands free later in the car

You still turn pages, but you are not babysitting the process page by page while listening.

Three: accept the hard truth about physical books.
There is no magic way to turn a paper book into audio instantly without either scanning it or accessing an existing audiobook. Paper has no export function. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling vibes, not solutions.

So the real decision point is effort vs availability:
• If an audiobook exists anywhere → borrow it
• If it does not → bulk scan once, then drive forever
• If neither is tolerable → the format is the bottleneck, not you

One last neurodivergent friendly tip.
Many people scan only the chapters they plan to listen to that week. No need to convert the whole book upfront. Think in chunks, not completion.

This is not about laziness. It is about matching the medium to the moment. Driving demands audio. Paper resists. Technology negotiates.

And yes, it is reasonable to refuse page by page.