Things are moving very rapidly on the technology front for libraries. We've recently introduced a new type of talking book reader known has the Victor Reader Stream from Humanware, to our home library service. The readers, are basically MP3 players designed specifically from people with a vision impairment and are light, easy to use and can convert printed documents into read documents on the fly.
We've also grabbed ourselves a couple of Amazon Kindles to test and explore how we can use them across the library service.
Kindles are an ebook reader designed to integrate into the Amazon online book shop. Ebooks are considerably less expensive than their hardcopy versions and the waiting time between orering a book on Amazon and its delivery to the kindle is about 15 seconds. That's pretty fast torunaround.
Kindles only became available in Australia in the last couple of weeks and I've been very impressed with the usability and readability of the devices. A lot of libraries in the States are already lending the devices to their members. Hopefully the range of ebook readers available in Australia will start to expand.
