Category: book Nook
What do you prefer and why? I prefer audio books, because I can relax better when reading an audio book and if the reader is good, I think it's much better. How about you?
hmmm i'm mixed on that one. if i read a braille book, i don't get so distracted easily and i have a better imagination. if i read an audio book, i get rather distracted. i do read both though and i have listened to all the harry potter books through audio.
hmm its depends on the type of book i'm reading and the reader that read on audio book. some reader is good in expression, some are not. its much depends lol.
I prefer braille ones. Audio can be drowsy at times, but reading braille books makes me more awake. And, i can estimate whether I want to finish the whole chapter and take a break or certain incident. hmmm, miss reading books!!!
audio audio audio! I am an emphatic braille hater. I only use it when absolutely necessary and sometimes not even then. It's slow, cumbersome, huge and good for nothing in this electronic age. Audio or synthesised does fine for me, sometimes I even prefer synth cause I can read at over 300 wpm, which makes it faster.
I'm a purist and I want braille to survive so I prefer to use it whenever possible ...but as my brother bought me a cracking machine for reading books on cd,I can hardly go and refuse a good audio book smile.....And quite often I become really impatient while waiting for a book to be returned from Edinburgh..
Braille is too large, and too slow. You can't read it on the go, ever, anywhere, for any reason. You can't carry several volumes of a braille book for when you finish one (you can carry a few cds or tapes). You can't pack it away quickly or easily when the time comes. You can't mark your place as well. The only thing braille books are good for is when you have to read them out of order (like a magazine or a textbook).
i love braille, books, cause i have my braille note. but i will read audio if i cant find the book in braille. does anybody no of any free audio books cites?
And by the way, Sheelob! Good choice to read the Harry-Potter books audio, the reader's good. The German one is good too, so if anyone wants to practise his German and wants to listen to HP-books in German, the reader's really good.
I love braille when possible. But I like www.audible.com. I prefer my braille to be on my BrailleNote.
is that www.audiable.com free? you dont need like certain softwares to make them work do you.
no www.audible isn't free. but I prefer audio books. I just recently finished learning braille and don't think i will use it much. I think i'm a little to slow to read a book. It would take me forever! lol smile- angel
No, audible isn't free, but I've heard of audiobooksforfree.com or something like that.
I generally prefer Braille, and always have. However, i've recently become and audible member, and i like it too. I like both audio and braille. I love having e-books on my BrailleNote.
I much prefer braille books when I can get them, but audio-books are generally easier to find, either online or in libraries.
I usually prefer Braille books, especailly if it's something I'm extremely interested in so that I can read it whenever I want. But lately, I've been trying to put a lot of my things on CD's so JAWS can read them. I've gotten slower at reading Braille because since I graduated from school, there hasn't been much to read except magazines but I usually skip around on those. I could get books from the State Library but wouldn't have time to enjoy them because of college. As for audio, as in tapes and that thing, it really depends on the reader. If it's a short story or a very interesting novel, I don't mind. (Actually, the only novel I've read with a tape was The Wolves of Willoughby chase, but not only was it interesting, but the author had the British accent which was the setting of the story anyway. *smiles*) Oh, and I'd also listened to something about Mother Teresa which was also interesting to me.
Leilani
I prefer braille books, mainly because for some reason I like to see how things are spelled. Plus I can fit a ton of braille on my braille note. However, if I don't have a textbook or something in braille, I'll use tape.
So most of you prefer Braille. Interesting. I can really relax better and enjoy "reading" more when I listen to an audio books.
Don't bother with www.audiobooksforfree.com. The "free" is a scam. Yes, you can get them for free, but at 8 bit awful quality. Unless you are in a quiet setting with a good audio player and headset you will not be able to understand the reader at all. Also, you have to jump through several hoops to get them, including a sign up process. If you want a better quality book, you need to pay.
Thanks for that. I hadn't tried it before, I'd just heard of it.
I wish somebody would have told me that sonner about that audiobooksforfree.com cause i registered for it. god i hope i dont have to pay for it. maybe if i ignore it it will go away.
Xena
I am with those who prefer audio books, at least for good fiction reading. Braille is bulky, and takes up too much room. I told my nls library where I get my books not to send me any more braille, unless I requested it. However, braille is better if you are studying something, and need toread the same text over and over to learn it. But I would still much rather listen to audio books. Cassette tapes don't take up that much room. I just wish they put pc world magazine on cassette like they do smart computing.
wonderwoman
Generally, I'd rather read braille on my brialle lite. Sure, it is slower, but I have to use my immagination more and reading also helps with spelling words properly. Beofre I read a lot of textbooks and stuff like that in braille, I was a horid speller. I'm still by no means perfect, but I think my spelling has improved dramatically. The only time I prefer audio books over braille is if I am doing something else at the same time such as eating dinner, doing house work, etc. But even with 140gb of memory here, I'd rather read braille files because they take up much less rooom. For example, I have here gravity by Tess garison in brf format and it is roughly 500kb. With the unabridged audio version in mp3 format, the complete book is about 300mb. But if I didn't have a braille lite or any such notetaker, I would still prefer braille books because of the reasons listed at the top of my post. Interesting topic.
Yes, this is a very interesting topic, and I have to share my thoughts! I enjoy both audio and braille books. However, I'd say a majority of the time, I try to find a book in electronic braille so I can read it on my BrailleNote. However, if that is not possible, I'll resort to audio. great topic!!!
Well, braille can be okay sometimes, but I can imagine better what happens in that book, and if the reader is good, it can be much better than braille.
prefer Electronic books, so I could have the choice of listening or reading. Since last September, though, I prefer Audio, even if it’s NLS stuff. No one can read over 100 words in Braille no matter how very talented you are, but you can go loads faster with audio.
I love audio books. It saves on carrying volumes of braille around. Plus you can get all the pronounciations better from the reader.
Not always. There is contradictions with audio books.
For example
Jim Dale reads Seamus’s name like shamus, and the movies say seamus.
I don’t know if anyone else caught his pronounciation mistake in SS, because I did. Dale read Snape as Snipe.
Yeah, I caught that. I prefer audio, but if Im reading it in braille, I'll sometimes catch myself reading the characters lines, and being silent where its describing something.
I didn’t say you couldn’t like it, I was just letting you know they aren’t always right or might not be right all the time with things.
I like to read braille most of the time but if I can't fin it n braille then I'lldo audio. But a someone who reads at 310 words per minute braille is fun to read and it improves my spelling. Also it's good for the imagination!
I tend to prefer audiobooks. The only time I would read braille is if I was actually studying something, usually math. I agree though about the fact that sometimes audiobook narrators can be inaccurate or inconsistent with their pronunciations. I recently bit the bullet and purchased both the Belgariad and Malloreon novels from Audible.com. They're narrated by a guy named Cameron Beirle. While he is a good narrator in terms of expression, and he's long since proven me wrong about not being able to capture the great humor found throughout the series, he does tend to be more than a little inconsistent with pronunciations. Granted many of the names of characters and places in these novels can be hard to read let alone say out loud. But he sometimes mispronounces or perhaps misemphasizes would be a better word if indeed it is one, a few long words like irrevocably. But judging by his slight accent I get the feeling that English wasn't necessarily his native language so that can be excused. But he does make a good effort and he does do a good job Narrating despite these little quirks, otherwise I would never have spent the money and credits...especially now that I figured out why I couldn't play the sound samples on the Audible site. Turns out it was a hotkey conflict in Window-Eyes. But getting back on topic, I do prefer audio because I often remember things better that way.
I used to read Braille books, but now I love audio books.
This is indeed an interesting topic. I had to send my PAC Mate Braille display back - it's served me faithfully for 5.5 years doing hard time ... <g>
So I downloaded books from NLS and did read through one but barely enjoyed it: it's a lot more like school - which in my time meant tapes and not JAWS or anything.
I tried reading sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, even just doing a SayAll - but kept scrolling back up to see how something was laid out. By that I mean did a conversation end, or something similar.
I still feel like I did in school; like I'm listening to it rather than reading it, as though it's going into a different part of my brain somehow. Don't know if this makes sense to any medical / psychology people here, or if it's my own imagination.
So I quit reading books till my display comes back.
I will use speech on my computer, but especially for reading a good book, Braille is the bomb.
And now with the newer versions of PAC Mate, I can use eReader - you pay for the books there also, but they're electronic text. Not as small as BRF, and of course BRF books are nicely formatted for the display.
To the one who says they don't read Braille very fast (I'd say ... yet), sounds like from what you said you used to see. Well, you didn't always read print fast either; just give yourself a chance and with time you'll get faster.
Also no writing system be it Braille, print or Chinese characters could really be classed archaic unless it's a dead language like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Braille being archaic is a myth worthy of Snopes status - and I think matches the general American illiteracy phenomenon more closely than anything else.
I think the most sobering experience I had with this was when my daughter was going into second grade. Granted, she can see, but here's what made me think: I'd been reading to her for years. You know how they say you've got to read to your kids, it inspires them to read, etc. Didn't know if that really worked, but I liked it, and more importantly she did. Thinking we'd been doing right, at the teacher conference or whatever it was, I was asked about reading, what we do about it, don't remember exactly. Anyway I said I always read to her. Well the teacher brought up that she should be reading to us, going on and on about how important that is.
Well on my way to work, I was mentally grousing about how you just can't win, some people, I need a beer ... and then I realized if this person is right, and if my daughter were both blind and not literate in Braille, what would she do? I don't remember what the benefit was supposed to be for her reading to us, but I doubt a Read All with a screen reader would do the same.
I'm not a member of any organization that politically lobbies about Braille, nor would I judge any blind person who hasn't had the same chance / access to reading material - what's the point of that?
But I just found that whole idea ... sobering.
I agree that braille is, and needs to be, very much alive. I]ve tried audio only for math, statistics and programming and my brain just does not get it, I don]t seem to have the mental capacity to break down the problem and to "stare at it" if you will, which is very important thing about braille. Braille's biggest issue is its bulkiness and waste of paper, which can be addressed by better use of electronic braille devices. I still prefer audio books for relaxation and/or speed reading, but braille is, and remains, very important for any sort of spelling, math and scientific reading. Spelling is particularly important, you can make Jaws pronounce very misspelled words correctly and only by reading them in braille will you get a feel for what the word looks like.
Isn]t it astaunding though that you can fit tens of thousands of braille pages or hunreds of CDs onto a device that fits in the smallest of your pockets. They]ve invented a disk that can take up to 1.6 terabytes of data, expect it to be out in 2 to 3 years, you can probably put all the books ever written on one of those, definitely on two. I hope we can find more creative ways to use this space for learning and accessing knowledge.
I'd read everything in braille, if I could. With places like bookshare,braille taking up space is becoming less of a problem, since you can download books on to a BrailleNote, if you have one. I'll read audio if I can't find the books in braille, but I'd definitely prefer everything to be in braille. It allows me to enjoy the book more, and for me to imagine things better.