Fact #1: Free Audiobooks from RFBD and Bookshare; Only Bookshare Includes Text

It's true. With a professional certifying your need for audiobooks, you or your child can have access to a huge free source of audiobooks, magazines, and newspapers that can be downloaded to your personal computer, laptop, iPhone, or iPod. The advantage of RFBD and Bookshare over Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg, is that they have books are are still in copyright - so new books, current text books, etc.

RFBD stands for Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic (http://www.rfbd.org) * NewsFlash RFBD.org is changing its domain name to: learningally.org
RFBD has books that are read by volunteers, not professionals. RFBD uses a Windows Media Player (free) that allows some changes in speed and chapter headings, but no word search capabilities. Most textbooks are separated into chapters.

Register for RFBD here. RFBD will supply the recording, but not the printed text. If you need to read along while listening, or have pictures, then buy the book or check it out from the library.

Bookshare is Bookshare.org (http://www.bookshare.org)
Bookshare comes with a free download Read Outloud which recognizes their Daisy formatted books and magazines. Text-to-speech software reads back the book. The nice thing about Bookshare is that you can listen while reading. You can also search, make notes, and highlights in the text. The down side is that you cannot speed up the reading with the free software that they give you. To adjust the speed, you need to purchase another program like TextAloud.

Bookshare books can be saved as text or html files on your computer. This is handy if you want to convert the books to MP3 files to listen on your iPod or use in another software reader.

Fact #2: RFBD Comes as MP3; Additional Software is Needed Convert Bookshare to MP3

Bookshare may be trying to convert their books to MP3 format, but at the present time, additional software is necessary to listen to books on MP3 recorders. RFBD books come  as MP3.  We bought Textaloud (http://textaloud.com) anyway because the voices were better and speed and pitch capabilities are handy when you want to alter the speed.  Other options: Kurzweil 1000 (www.kurzweiledu.com) and Open Book (www.freedomscientific.com).

In Bookshare we save books as html or txt and then open in TextAloud. A lot of voices are available. A great on is Neospeech Paul.

But check out 'Lawrence' reading The Raven below! Pretty wild!

Fact #3: Text-to-Speech Voices Really Have Gotten Better!

We eventually chose Neospeech Paul and Kate (http://voicetoolbox.com/ns-audio.htm) which is available for private use.