Hurrah for digital audio books! They're easier to navigate than tapes, and if you buy downloads, or borrow DAISY CDs from RNIB's Talking Book Service, you can save yourself money (and space in your CD racks) too.
Talking Books
Our
Talking Book Service is a great way to read thousands of titles delivered direct to your door. All you need is a
DAISY player and a subscription to get access to more than 20,000 professionally recorded audio books - the
largest collection of unabridged audio books in the UK.
Unlike audio books on normal CDs, readers can use the DAISY technology to skip to a new chapter, or the next paragraph, and insert a bookmark.
The
Talking Book library includes popular fiction, classic titles and non-fiction. Most titles are unabridged and, thanks to DAISY, fit on a single CD.
If you have your own DAISY format CD player, a books-only annual subscription is only £50 a year. We sell a variety of DAISY players with different functions from our
online shop.
Alternatively the full loan annual subscription (cost £82) includes the loan of a DAISY player as well as Talking Books.
Join the Talking Book Service today.
RNIB Bookstream
There is another way to listen to titles from the Talking Book library and that's by listening to them online via Bookstream.
RNIB's Paul Porter helps other blind and partially sighted people with technology queries and problems. He has also described Bookstream for Access IT magazine.
"The BookStream club runs alongside the Talking Books Service. The BookStream club costs £50 a year. The BookStream e-delivery service enables the subscriber to browse the catalogue, search by title, author, subject or keywords. When search results are displayed you can add a book to your virtual bookshelf. You can have up to five books on your bookshelf at any one time. When you subscribe to the BookStream club, you download and install the Net Plextalk player software.
"When you select a book from your bookshelf, the Net Plextalk Player starts playing the book. It will remember your position when you stopped listening for each book on your bookshelf. You can set bookmarks and move from section to section as you can with a standard talking book player. You have to listen to the books in real time but they can be speeded up or slowed down when listening to them."
DAISY books
There are, of course, some books you will want to keep and we can now sell you a selection of DAISY books. You can choose from our
DAISY gift range, which come with cover artwork that looks great on a shelf, and includes box sets like the
Lord of the Rings trilogy (14.99).
Or you can try our new DAISY audio books: made to order service. You order a book, we put it on a DAISY audio CD, put the CD in a clear plastic DVD case and post it to you. If your DAISY audio book fits on one CD it costs £9.99. If it fits on two CDs it will cost £14.99.
We already have more than 240 titles (both fiction and non-fiction) available, with another 20 titles added every month. You can
browse the made to order books available in our online shop.
Downloads
Another popular source of audio books is
Audible. The site has more than 40,000 titles that you can buy and download to your computer and many
MP3 players. You can make one-off purchases, or sign up to buy one or two titles every month (for £7.99 or £14.99) and save money on many titles.
There are also websites where you can download free audiobooks.
Librivox is a public website, where members of the public record books which are in the public domain for anyone to download for free.
You could also try
Audiobooks for free - a site where you can get books for free of a "bearable" quality, or pay for higher quality files.
Another site offering paid-for downloads is
Audioville.
You can also find an impressive list of audio book and e-text websites at Tom Lorimer's
Whitestick website.
If you have a source of audiobooks you'd like to recommend, please share it by emailing
productreviews@rnib.org.uk.