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 through your door. All you need is a
DAISY player and a subscription to get access to more than 16,000 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 its online shop.
Alternatively the full loan annual subscription (cost £82) includes the loan of a DAISY player as well as Talking Books. Often the cost of the subscription will be paid for by your local authority - so we recommend you contact them (social services or library service department) and then call us - 0303 123 9999.
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 nearly 400 titles - both fiction and non-fiction - and each book will cost no more than its printed equivalent. So you can buy the
Lord of the Rings trilogy for £14.99,
The Time Traveler's Wife for £7.99,
Notes on a Scandal or
The Line of Beauty for £4.99
You can browse DAISY books at our
online shop, or browse for titles in the
Book Site.
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. If you have a source of audiobooks you'd like to recommend, please share it by emailing
productreviews@rnib.org.uk.
You can also find an impressive list of audio book and e-text websites at Tom Lorimer's
Whitestick website.