Digital Talking Book Player Photo
Since the first prototype in 2006, I finally received my Digital Talking Book Player, after being on the waiting list for the last year. Older people got first dibbs on the players, but I was lucky enough to receive mine this past week, which came as a complete surprise to me.
First, the cool thing about this device, is the Talking Book and Braille Library are finally moving into the digital age, away from the old cassette tapes of the 70′s and 80′s. Not only that, but by switching to digital, they jumped right into 3GP quicktime format and jump drive technology.
To learn more about the player, and see additional screen shots, you can go here
The player itself has nice large, easy to see and feel, buttons that have good contrast. They also have braille symbols, like ‘R” is for rewind, “P” is for play, “S” is for stop, etc. There are also speed and tone buttons that not only move the tone and speed up and down, but actually tell you when your at the “normal” setting, which is very handy. When you don’t have a book plugged in, the player comes with an internal user manual, that you can listen to on demand, that tells you what each button does, and other such manual instructions that we need to know to operate the player, including all those informative user safety and FCC instructions. lol.
There are two different ways you can play books on the player. You can either request books on loan in the new cartridge format, or there is a USB port on the side of the unit, that supports 1 and 2 GB Flash drives. Most books are well under 1 GB in size, so the fact it only supports 2 GB max is plenty big enough. The flash drive, or cartridge, can only hold 1 book at a time anyway, because the player doesn’t support multiple books on the same medium anyway, which I guess could be a disadvantage, but its easy enough just to delete and transfer a new book to it using any Computer, so that isn’t a big deal to me.
There are two things I don’t like about the player though…
- There is no “lock” switch, so when your carrying it around in a bag or purse, buttons can get pressed accidentally, which has happened to me a few times in my back pack.
- When you press the FF or RW buttons, it jumps forward or backward 5 seconds, and since there are no ‘beeps’ to tell you when you’ve reached a certain point in the book, you just have to guess how long the table of contents is, just as an example, so you know when to release the rewind or fast forward buttons.
However, despite those two flaws, the player has awesome sound quality. Besides the addition of those two things, I wouldn’t change anything about the player, but since this is a prototype, I can see those things being added in the near future. but who knows, the old casette tape players never changed in the 30 years I owned mine, so who knows if improvements will be released or not.
I think the players most coolest feature, is the ability to purchase a blank cartridge from Independant Living Aids. The advantage to purchasing a blank cartridge, and cable, is that you can use the blank cartridge as a USB drive in your computer. The cartridge does have a USB port on the side, but you need the cable to plug it into your computers USB port, otherwise the cartridge won’t fit into an open USB port. The cable is simply a USB female to male converter cable, which I imagine you could purchase at any store too in any size you want, but Independant Living Aids, is the only one who sells the cartridges. At $10 a piece though, you really could afford to buy 4-5 of them if you really wanted to, but I chose to purchase just 1 set for now.
The cool thing about this, is you can simply go to the Library of Congress talking book and braille library’s website, login with an ID and password that is supplied to you when you register, and from there, you can do an online search for any book you want from the available titles at the Library of Congress. Its like doing a search at your local library, once you’ve found the book your looking for, you simply click on a link to download the book to your computer. The books are in .zip file format, so you need something like Winzip to be able to extract them onto the cartridge, or USB drive. The player doesn’t support putting books into folders, or directories, so you have to just copy all the files into the root directory of the cartridge or USB drive, then the book plays in the player. How cool is that!
Even though I could just use an old USB drive, the USB drive slot is on the right side of the unit, so if your carrying it around with you, you risk the USB thumb drive falling out or getting lost or stolen. Who knows, it could fall out while your walking. The blank cartridge idea is better, because the cartridge slot is in the front of the unit, not the side, so you don’t risk loosing your thumb drive, like I’m sure I would do. hehe. The cartridge slot, there is no possible way for it to fall out or get stolen, so thats why I bought the blank cartridge separately.
What I like about that whole idea, is you don’t have to worry about sending the cartridges back in 30 days. The talking book and braille library, has been upset with me over the years for being late on sending talking books back to the library, but thats because they send me like 9 or 10 books at once, and expect you to be able to listen to all those in 30 days, it just can’t be done, so I like this new idea of being able to download the books you want from the website, so I don’t have to worry about returning them. Since I have to walk 2 miles down to the post office in the snow, rain, and cold weather, this new system is a dream come true for me. No more having to return those stupid cartridges that won’t fit in your mailbox! woohoo!!! hehe
Personally, I think this new system would be beneficial to alot of people, not just the blind and dyslectic, but its limited for people who are blind or dyslexic in some way. If I wasn’t blind, I would pay money for a service like this, its really nice. Oh, and the player runs on a rechargeable battery pack built into the unit, that has a 29 hour battery life. How cool is that! and if it ever needs serviced for any reason, like if the battery dies or whatever, you can send it back for FREE and get a new player free of charge. Its a nice service they do for the blind and disabled, it really is. I wish there selection of books was a little more complete, but I think that will come in time. There basically limited to fiction and non-fiction books, and a select few magazines, so there selection has never been the greatest, never was on cassette tape either, but its definitely an improvement over the old cassette tape loan system. I, and several of my blind friends, are very impressed with it.
Bowling is made accessible to the blind by the use of a guide rail that help orient the bowlers on the lane to line up shots. The guide helps the bowler align their shot on the approach, replacing the arrows or other reference points sighted bowlers would use.