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Fledchen · 12-20-2008, 07:37 AM

I've made a few attempts at reading ebooks over the past few years, and was never able to stick with it. I finally purchased a dedicated screen-based ebook reader (Sony PRS-505) on Tuesday this week, and I know I finally made the right choice.

I am legally blind, due to problems with the reflexes and muscles that control my eye movements and focusing. While some people might complain about the small screen size of the PRS-505, it's wonderful for me because the less my eyes have to move around the page, the less likely it is that they'll go all screwy and make it impossible to read.

Most of my "reading" over the past few years has been through audiobooks. In addition to the audiobooks I can get from the public library, I'm fortunate to be able to have access to the Library of Congress National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, from which I can get both downloadable audiobooks and downloadable braille files. I don't have a braille display device, but I do have a program on my computer that I can use to convert the books to plain text. Because of copyright laws, I can't share these books, they're only for registered print disabled people, so please don't ask. I am also a member and volunteer for Bookshare.org, which is a nonprofit that makes scanned books available to registered print-disabled people (blind, dyslexic, etc.). I've tried listening to text books on my pocket-sized text-to-speech device, the VictorReader Stream, but it's just too difficult to distinguish between different sentences and paragraphs, and while the synthesized voice sounds very good, it pronounces so many words incorrectly that it's distracting. So, I mostly use the Stream for audiobooks, and now I have a device I can use for text books.

12-20-2008, 07:37 AM	#1
Fledchen Guru Posts: 663 Karma: 84658 Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: Minnesota, USA Device: PB360+, Sony950, VR Stream, iPod Touch, iPad	Hello from Fledchen! I've made a few attempts at reading ebooks over the past few years, and was never able to stick with it. I finally purchased a dedicated screen-based ebook reader (Sony PRS-505) on Tuesday this week, and I know I finally made the right choice. I am legally blind, due to problems with the reflexes and muscles that control my eye movements and focusing. While some people might complain about the small screen size of the PRS-505, it's wonderful for me because the less my eyes have to move around the page, the less likely it is that they'll go all screwy and make it impossible to read. Most of my "reading" over the past few years has been through audiobooks. In addition to the audiobooks I can get from the public library, I'm fortunate to be able to have access to the Library of Congress National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, from which I can get both downloadable audiobooks and downloadable braille files. I don't have a braille display device, but I do have a program on my computer that I can use to convert the books to plain text. Because of copyright laws, I can't share these books, they're only for registered print disabled people, so please don't ask. I am also a member and volunteer for Bookshare.org, which is a nonprofit that makes scanned books available to registered print-disabled people (blind, dyslexic, etc.). I've tried listening to text books on my pocket-sized text-to-speech device, the VictorReader Stream, but it's just too difficult to distinguish between different sentences and paragraphs, and while the synthesized voice sounds very good, it pronounces so many words incorrectly that it's distracting. So, I mostly use the Stream for audiobooks, and now I have a device I can use for text books.