AV Books: Technology for Reading

by John M. Williams

Presenting a technology that allows you to read a book or have it read to you-or both at the same time! Is this the future of reading?

I love reading. I relish the intimacy of holding a book in my hands, relaxing in a chair and having the written word transport me to another time, another place and to experience the excitement of being part of someone else’s life.

When I travel, I take a book with me, but with the size of books today, a 300-page book is cumbersome to carry and adds weight to my luggage. As my air, car and train travel time have increased, I’ve searched for alternative forms of reading, including cassette tapes and audio books on CD.

Clumsy Technologies

Cassette tapes have never attracted me. The sizes of the boxes they come in are sometimes as large as the printed version of the book. To play the tapes, you need to carry a cassette player or have one in the car. Twice when I was listening to tapes, they broke. One time, I packed a cassette tape on a cross-country trip and when I opened my luggage the plastic case had melted.

Blind friends have told me they do not like cassette tapes because they are difficult to manage, the tapes have to be changed every 30 to 60 minutes, and they break. “When you pay $40 for tapes, you expect to have them for awhile,” says a friend who is blind. She only buys audio books on CD.

Audio books have interested me for a while. When traveling by train or plane, I enjoy leaning back, closing my eyes and listening to someone reading a novel, biography or history book. After purchasing a laptop recently, my interest in audio books has increased.

Audio books are easy to operate. I open the CD drive on my laptop, press the CD snugly onto the slot, push the drive back and in seconds I’m listening. Some audio books, like Stephen King’s Blood and Smoke, even use music in the background to highlight the mood.

CD audio books are not perfect, though. There is voice, but no text. Anywhere from one to four CDs are in the box, which means you have to change the CD multiple times to listen to the book. If you want to take a break on most CDs, you have to press pause or lose your place. If you take the CD out, you have no choice but to listen to the book from the beginning of that section.

Elegant Solution

Recently, I was introduced to AV Books (www.avbooks.com). This is a different technology for reading, and one I like very much. The AV Book is a single MP3 CD that can be read and listened to on your computer, or on any MP3 Player. MP3, a form of digital compression, is an acronym for Moving Picture Experts Group 1 Audio Layer 3.

How do MP3s work?

MP3s are based on a psycho-acoustic model, which recognizes that the human ear cannot hear all the audio frequencies on a recording. The human hearing range is between 20 Hz to 20 KHz and it is most sensitive between 2 to 4 KHz. When sound is compressed into an MP3 file, an attempt, known as “destructive” compression, is made to eliminate the frequencies that can’t be heard. After a file is compressed, the data eliminated in the creation of the MP3 can’t be replaced.

When encoding a file into MP3, a variety of compression levels can be set. For instance, an MP3 created with 128-Kbit compression will be of a greater quality and larger file size than that of 56-Kbit compression. The more the compression level decreases, the poorer the sound quality.

The AV Book is an unabridged audio and digital textbook. You can choose whether to display one or two pages, whether to have the audio reader on or off, how fast to go, and so forth. The adjustable rate of reading speed allowed me to listen and read quickly. On my computer, the AV Book looks exactly like the paper edition with pages that turn and the full color dust cover of the original hard cover.

A well-known writer/teacher friend of mine, who has seen this technology says, “This technology has many benefits for teaching and for enticing students to read.” An orthopedic surgeon, who treats many students experiencing back problems, told me, “Medically, this technology can alleviate the pain students incur from carrying pounds of books on their back.”

Among the many features of the technology that I like are: highlighting, highlight playback, note-taking, book marking, word search, library selection and sorting. If you need to enlarge the print, the zoom feature adjusts the print to different sizes. At 59 years of age, I read comfortably at 12 point.

The book is ideal for the traveling reader, and portability is a plus with this technology. Multiple AV Books can be loaded onto your computer, eliminating the need to carry bulky texts.

I am looking forward to the time when I can have many classics on my laptop. Since up to 250,000 words can be put on one AV Book, audio books that use three or four CDs are ancient history with this technology.

Applications for People with Disabilities

Interested in providing reading access to people with disabilities, the founder of AV Books, George Hay, believes “This technology provides information access to individuals who are blind, visually impaired, learning disabled, people with physical disabilities and to people without disabilities.”

To expand its usability, voice recognition programs can be used to operate the program. “We want to guarantee books to everyone and this is one way of doing it,” says Hay.

During this era of seeking the highest return for dwindling education revenues, one AV Book can be duplicated hundreds of times for classes. This means that books on law, science, mathematics, history, languages, government and other subjects can be purchased and utilized for a fraction of what schools and students spend today.

AV Books is a technology with a future.

John Williams has been writing about assistive technology for 25 years. A sample of his book Assistive Technologies: Creating a Universe of Opportunities for People with Disabilities can be seen at www.atn-ctcf.org.