A great step forward has been made: Aglona Reader, a free program for reading parallel (bilingual) books in Windows, now supports manually synchronized sound from MP3 audiobooks! Thanks to tremendous efforts of Andrey Zhuravlev, an extension of PBO format has been developed which allows synchronization of any fragment of the parallel book with its corresponding part in the MP3 file. Andrey has also written a program, ParaBooks Maker, for converting PBO into PBS and synchronizing them with MP3 file(s) using Waveform Display and Phrase Guessing features.
Now in Aglona Reader 1.5 you can open PBS files and press Enter or click on any fragment to listen to it being narrated. There is also a continuous playback mode (Space or Right arrow) when the book is narrated without pauses and a frame "runs" through the text and highlights the fragments being read.
As a demonstration of the new possibilities I have prepared an audio version of "The Lady with the Dog", a story by Anton Chekhov, previously aligned in Russian and English by JamarriJa, a masterrussian.net member. Russian narration by Ilya Zmeev from прочту.ру. You can find download links for the latest 1.5 version of the program, as well as the book, on the site of Aglona Reader.