Text to speech and audio books are two different things.
Text to speech is software that "reads" the text file and coverts it into sound. Kindle 2 has this, though I think it sounds too mechanical and the pronunciation mistakes are too frequent to be of any real use.
Audio books are recordings of someone reading the book. They are saved as audio files, and can be played like any other audio file -- mp3, wav, etc.
The nook does not have text to speech. It does have the capability of playing audio book mp3 files.
There is a built in mono speaker and a stereo headphone jack.
DCM
