Steve Kelley
Reading Bookshare titles on a tablet or smartphone has come a long way since the initial release of Read2Go in 2011 for $19.99, which was pricey for an app at the time. It was basic, and when Voice Dream Reader came out the following year, with more features and a lower price, Read2Go gradually became less popular. The new app from Bookshare, the Bookshare Reader may become a bit of a game changer, because it is free for both iOS and Android, and includes more features. For many Android users, like this writer, a newcomer with more features is a welcome addition to the existing Android apps, like Dolphin's Easy Reader-- a free, basic reader for Bookshare, NFB Newsline, and other international libraries. Although Voice Dream Reader has more features than the new Bookshare Reader, it's currently only available for iOS and the Mac, and is now $19.99 in the App Store, so there is plenty of room now for a free reading app for Bookshare titles. The Bookshare Reader is available for download right from the Bookshare website or from either the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.
What's Bookshare?
Bookshare is the largest collection of accessible ebooks in the world, with over 1.1 million titles. A subscription to Bookshare requires the subscriber is unable to access print because of blindness or low vision or other physical condition that makes print inaccessible. For students, there is no charge for an annual subscription. This student discount is also available to adults enrolled in some rehab programs or registered with Hadley.edu. Nonstudents will pay an annual subscription rate of $50, but subscribers can download up to 100 ebooks a month at no cost. Bookshare titles are available as digital text, so they can be read as large print on an app, or with a screen reader. It's been this writer's experience that new releases are often more readily available on Bookshare than other sources, like the National Library Service Talking Books program.
Books are available in a number of accessible formats and can also be read from the Bookshare website. Apps like Voice Dream Reader, Easy Reader, and now the Bookshare Reader, connect directly to Bookshare with the subscriber's username and password, and import the electronic text right into the app. Getting a book is as simple as doing a search for a title or author, selecting the title, and downloading to the app. It can take as little as a minute or two to have a new title in your hands, and there's no time limit—the book is yours until you delete it from the app.
Bookshare Reader
Getting started with the Bookshare Reader was pretty simple. From the Google Play Store the Bookshare Reader was easy to find and download to my Android phone. When the app first opened it prompted me for my Bookshare username and password. Once logged in, a page opened with a list of Recent Books downloaded from Bookshare on this writer's other devices. Each title had an arrow which, when selected, downloaded the title to the Bookshare Reader. Once downloaded the title then appeared in the list of downloads, which opened from the tab at the top of the page labeled Downloads. Selecting one of the downloaded books opens it to the page where the reader last left off. It appears that the Bookshare Reader synchs across devices, so whichever device you open your book on, it will open to wherever you left off, regardless of which device you were last reading on.
Readers will find the title of the book across the top of the reading view, and to the right of it the gear icon for the reading settings. At first, on the Android phone, the settings icon was not obvious because the icon blended into the book title. It was not until the app was loaded onto an iPad that the location of the settings icon, shaped like a gear, became apparent, since both the iOS app and Android app are laid out nearly identically. On this writer's Android the text size is increased, and this affected the appearance of some of the app's visible features. Of course, with TalkBack on, the settings icon was announced just to the right of the book title.
Bookshare Reader App Settings
The Bookshare Reader has a wide variety of settings for text size, color, and speech, that really set it apart from an app like Dolphin's Easy Reader. When Settings is first opened the reader is placed into the Quick Set tab, which is a really convenient set of the most popular settings. From here, the audio speed, text size, font, and one of the popular color themes may be adjusted. Each one of these options has its own tab at the top of the display with a broader set of choices. For example, in Quick Set there are three popular font styles, and three presets for color to choose from. When the tab for each one of these options is open, more settings for customization are available.
Although the Quick Set for audio only offers a slider and presets for voice speed, the Audio tab includes more voice settings. Fifteen voices are included for the English version of the app, eight for U.S. English and seven for UK English. In addition, voices can be sampled from this tab, voice rate changed, and check boxes are available to customize whether page numbers and image descriptions are read out loud.
Likewise, the Text tab provides 10 font choices, font sizes up to 48 point, and several settings to widen the text spacing. At the bottom of the page is a handy button to reset all the text settings back to the default.
In the Page tab, settings are available to set the page margins and line spacing. Page margins offers a choice of small, medium, or large for settings, and line spacing includes a slider control for fine-tuning. There is also a checkbox to turn on page numbers.
The last settings tab, labeled Color, provides six preset color themes, including white text on black background, yellow text on blue background, and blue letters on a yellow background to name three of the six. Below these preset options, however, are options to enable any color combination. Separate colors may be selected for the background, text, text highlighting, and sentence highlighting. Both text and sentence highlighting here refers to the text and sentence highlighting as the selection is being read.
Text Highlighting and Note Taking
The Bookshare Reader, like the Easy Reader does not include the ability to highlight text for later review, as readers can do in Voice Dream Reader. Text can be selected by the reader, copied and pasted somewhere or shared, but it can't be highlighted, like readers can do in the Voice Dream Reader and Kindle apps. Also, Voice Dream Reader has a feature so notes can be added to the text. Both features, for this reviewer would be important features for students, or anyone really in the habit of highlighting and making notes in their books.
Overall Impression
Bookshare Reader was easy to get started with, available as an Android app, and is free. Although Easy Reader also can be used for NFB Newsline, when reading something from Bookshare on my Android phone, I'll be using the Bookshare Reader because I have several more voices to choose from and more options to customize the color of the background and text color. Currently, bookmarking is not yet available although the app reports it is coming soon. It would be great to see highlighting coming soon as well because this will make it so much more useful for students.
The app layout was the same across Android, iPad, and iPhone, although on the iPhone X the first install did not include the reader controls when a book was open. At the bottom of the screen, from left to right, buttons appear to Navigate the Book (table of contents), Previous Sentence, Play, and Next Sentence. On the iPhone X, the Play and Previous Sentence buttons did not appear at first. The book's content, however, was readable with VoiceOver. After reinstalling the app from the App Store all the reading buttons appeared.
On the iPad, this writer will stick to the Voice Dream Reader app, because it has the other features, mentioned—highlighting, notes, etc. It also imports other document formats and webpages, which is really handy. Bookshare Reader will stay on the iPad though, if I'm reading a book purely for pleasure, having those extra voices available may come in handy. For newcomers reading on Bookshare, the Bookshare Reader app is a great place to get started and it will be exciting to see what other features will get added in addition to the upcoming Bookmarks feature.
