The Evolving World of Digital Audio Books and Players

South Carolina Assistive Technology Expo

March 15, 2011

Presenters: Lee Speer, Clay Jeffcoat, and Marty McKenzie, SC School for the Deaf

and the Blind

Objectives

• Identify a variety of digital book players for people with visual impairments and learning styles.

• Identify sources for obtaining digital books and players.

• Update on new digital audio book players and refinements to existing players that benefit readers of all ages.

Digital Audio books

There are a variety of audio book styles:

• Plain text

• Text with markup

• Plain audio

• Audio with markup

• Audio, text and markup.

Available formats

• mp3

• wav

• ogg

• wma

• xml

• Daisy (Digital Assessable Information Sys)

Free Digital Books

Project Gutenburghttp://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Loud Lithttp://www.loudlit.org/

Librivoxhttp://librivox.org/

Check your local library

Membership required Audio Books

RFBD: http://www.rfbd.org/

Bookshare: http://www.bookshare.org/

NLS: http://www.loc.gov/nls/

Audible: http://www.audible.com/

Obtaining Digital Books

• Each source has it’s own procedure for downloading.

• All files are large.

• Audio files are very large.

• Files are packaged and must be “unpackaged” prior to use.

Unpacking and Moving Files

• RFBD download manager

• Humanware companion

• WinZip

• Windows Explorer

UAK

• Playing RFB&D or NLS audiobooks.

• Must have an User Authorization Key (UAK).

Examples of Hardware players

Victor Reader Stream

Hardware (con’t)

Victor Reader Classic

Hardware (con’t.)

Bookport Plus

Hardware (con’t.)

NLSDigital

Talking Book Player

Hardware (con’t.)

Braille PlusMobile

Manager

Examples of Software players

• Victor Reader Soft

• "RFB&D Audio" App

Questions?

Thank you for Attending!