As always you can get books on Amazon and if you are looking for Audio versions, you can use Audible. In Amazon you get each book separately, while Audible allows you get a bunch of them using their subscription options. But still it is a pay-per-book.

However, if you really read a lot, or need to go through many books, reading just what you need in each one, you need something that is a “read-as-you-can” subscription.

Oyster got it for you. You can read any of its 100,000 titles for ~$10 a month. However, it has one drawback. It is currently restricted to the USA only.

Scribd has become my favourite recently. It has more than 300,000 books available for you to read on almost any device, it has no Geographic restrictions I am aware of, and you can signup to it via PayPal for less than $9 a month. You can keep books on your device and read them offline.

A complementary hack you can use allows you to turn almost any eBook you have on any App or device, turned into an Audio book, read using your phone’s text-read-aloud option. Here is a nice YouTube video on how to do it on iPhone, iPad devices:

Now that you got your Book Tools ready, let me share with you several Team Building Must-Reads I was recommended to read by my Management Empowerment mentor:

1. The Six Secrets of Change: What the Best Leaders Do to Help Their Organizations Survive and Thrive (Could not find this one on Scribd yet..)
2. Man’s Search For Meaning: The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust – This books shows you how you can control the one thing, no matter what happens to you as you try to lead, or simply survive.
3. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business – Here is this one on Scribd

Here is a last one, which I am going to take a look at soon:

Positive Poker: A Modern Psychological Approach to Mastering Your Mental Game – this one was recommended on the DABCC Radio – Virtualization & Cloud Podcast

What your current recommendations for great team building books or Text to Audio solutions?

P.S.

I just got this question from one of my Blog’s readers: Are you familiar with a good utility for creating an audio book (by using text-to-speech) that can get as input popular formats of e-books?

Here is my response: Great Question!!!

for desktop you could use TextAloud to read out Word docs and such.

On your iPhone and iPad look at SpeakIT! (I got it several days ago, since it is good if you want to turn a quick doc into audio, because it requires you to paste the text, rather than convert a file.

Another Mobile app is File Converter . I tried it several times and it looks awesome! I turns any file to any file. So you can convert from one eBook format to another, AND you can also convert eBooks into audio files! It uploads your eBook to a server, converts it and downloads the audio to your mobile device. Seem to work great! The sound type is pre-defined as far as I see.

Another option is SoundGecko which I use a lot. It converts web pages, PDF files, Blogs (RSS) into Audio using various sound types. You can get the Audio via the SoundGecko App or via a Podcast channel it creates for you.

Do let me know if you found something better..

Now all you need is time to listen all this 🙂
I don’t have an App for that (yet).