It is certainly another way of doing things. Here, we
more or less went from cassettes to downloads and USB cartridges
over night. The lending libraries in the US as part of the
national Library of Congress Talking Book program all distribute
pretty much the same media all over the country. Recorded books
come on either 4-track cassettes, digital Daisy books on
cartridge or many of the same books on a secure web site that
let readers download them free of charge to place on a thumb
drive that plugs in to the same player as the Daisy cartridges.
The Playsaway books sound like a clever idea for the
sort of thing you might hand a visiter to a museum, but I think
they would be kind of expensive on a large scale and then you
have the battery charging issue and buttons that eventually wear
out making the whole device useless.
Do you buy them to keep or does your lending library
want them back after a time?
Can your library reload the device with a new book
later?
I think about these things because I used to work in a
section of our state's lending library back in the seventies. We
provided tapes in open-reel and cassette form, Talking Book
Phonograph records and special FM sub carrier radio receivers .
We used and reused anything we could as, like many state
agencies, we had to be frugal. Our Nickel or 5-cent coin has a
picture of a buffalo on one side and the saying is when someone
is saving money that he could squeeze a Nickel until the buffalo
hollered. That was us, all right so I always liked to see
technology used to its fullest.
Dane Trethowan writes:
> This idea had to come, was wondering how long it would take.
>
> I received my latest delivery of audio books from my local library and
> noticed a rather unusual package, something similar to a DVD case.
>
> Upon opening this I discovered a small box of around 2 inches square
> consisting of several buttons on the front, a headphones socket and a
> lanyard for carrying around the neck, this is a "Playsaway" book and you
> buy them as is, that is to say when you buy the book you buy the machine
> with the book already programmed into it which makes a whole heap of
> sense.
>
> CD'S are easily damaged for one thing, if you want my personal opinion I
> think they're not as durable for books as cassette tapes were but then
> again, cassette tape had its own problems as many of us know.
>
> The buttons on the machine are incredibly straight forward, a power
> button, volume up/down buttons, fast forward and rewind buttons and an EQ
> button, more than enough to control your book listening.
>
> I was pleasantly surprised when I pressed the fast forward button to go
> to the next track when I heard the number of the track announced, very
> handy when skimming through the book trying to find a location or the
> last chapter where you were.
>
> I don't have a web site for these books but I'm sure you'll find them if
> you ask your friend Google.
>
> Given the development of these books I have to wonder what the future of
> Daisy audio publications may hold?
>
>
>
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