While the author's guild may have problems with software that can convert eBooks to poorly pronounced audiobooks, there are a lot of good reasons you might want to convert text to speech. It can make written documents accessible for visually impaired people. Or you can listen to the morning paper while riding the subway or driving your car to work.

Online conversion service Zamzar recently added text to speech conversion to its massive list of file conversion capabilities. Here's how it works. Just upload a Word, PDF, TXT, Wordperfect, Works, or OpenDocument Text doc to Zamzar and select MP3 as the output format. Enter your email address and after a few moments Zamzar will send you a link to an MP3 file with a digitized voice doing a passable but somewhat awkward reading of the text you uploaded.

Of course, there are plenty of desktop applications that will do the same thing. But Zamzar comes in handy if you're away from your home computer or if you're looking for a single service that lets you convert a whole slew of documents. You can also convert documents from DOC to PDF, PDF to HTML, JPG to BMP, and so on.