Favorite reading apps?

By Tristan, 12 October, 2013

Forum

iOS and iPadOS

I'm looking for a good, sturdy and reliable reading app for my iPhone. I've used Bard Mobile, as well as the Audible app, however I am looking for the best app out there that is accessible with voice over whilst providing a satisfactory textual reading experience. I've tried Voice Dream Reader, and have been told iLike2Read is good. I am very hesitant to pay the $9.99 price tag on Voice Dream, however. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Options

Comments

Depends What You Want

Audible, Voice Dream Reader, and Kindle are rather different animals. Audible plays audiobooks recorded by human narrators. Voice Dream Reader is a TTS app which reads aloud non-DRM protected e-books using a variety of synthetic voices which you can purchase for $2 or thereabouts. Kindle (like audible) is a free app but will read DRM protected books in the Kindle format. It can only use the Voiceover voice however. I cannot comment on the BARD app as it is only available to US blind people, I live in the United Kingdom. Another app you might want to consider is iBooks. It's very similar to Kindle in that it reads aloud the DRM protected books available from the Apple iBooks store. This app will also read non-DRM protected e-books in EPUB format. It uses the Voiceover voice. All the above are very accessible. Personally I use Kindle for books from Amazon, Voice Dream for any other open-source e-books and Audible for my audiobooks.

nook, bleo, Bookshare, bard mobile and google play:

Along with the E book theme barnes and noble's nook app is accessible and with it you can read nook books. bookshare has an app called read to go which does more that book share I think. Bleo allows you to purchase high priced books from the NFB affiliated store and Bard mobile allows you to listen to els audio books and read electronic braille books with your bluetooth braille display. You can read books from google with the google play book app although I've not yet found a book to read. I probably left somebody out but we've got a pretty good list here.

you most often get what you pay for:

The reason why voice dream reader costs is because of the engine it uses which does a good job of present material through the voices from which you can select. Ilike to read is free as far as I know, I have it and it's ok. A lot of what goes into the decision though is personal choice and sadly, there is no way to buy before you try unless you know someone who has something you want to take for a spin.

As a new book share member,

As a new book share member, Iam also looking for a reading app. For me, ease of use plus quality of reading is more important than trying to be all things to all people by having tons of features.

With that in mind, can anyone tell me how Read2go compares to VoiceStream Reader?

In the VoiceStream Reader review, it was mentioned that there were accessability problems with the apps book organization screens that would probably require a sighted use to manage. Is this still true?

Based on the descriptions of the two apps, you would think that VoiceStream Reader would cost more than Read2go, but Read2go is twice the cost of VoiceStream Reader.

Since my vision is bad enough that text of any size is useless to me, so far I have downloaded audio only books in MP3 format from book share. Unlike the books I get from BARD, which are audio recordings of books being read by humans, the book share audio recordings are of a TTS system reading the book. They are not perfect, but they are not bad either.

Voice Dream Reader

I use several reading apps on IOS. BARD and Audible are good for auio books. For text-based books, I think Voice Dream Reader is by far the best available. It integrates with your Bookshare account, so you can search for and download books directly from Voice Dream. It can also grab content from other places like its own mini-web browser, cloud apps like Dropbox, etc. The variety of TTS voices is also great. I'm personally a fan of the Neospeech James voice.

Like an earlier poster stated, "You get what you pay for." And Voice Dream Reader is easily worth its asking price. It's always being updated with fixes and improvements too.

Gene:

Although Read2Go works well and I used it extensively, I've deleted it since the advent of Voice dream Reader. Incidentally, that's three words -- VOICE, DREAM, READER -- not VoiceStream Reader. Frankly, I think Voice Dream Reader navigation works quite well and although it left a bit to be desired at first compared to Read2Go, this is no longer the case in my view. In fact, the text search and bookmarks features are superb! and if one uses a good TTS voice such as U.S. James, the rendering of text is almost pleasant. I say "almost" as I believe we need Morgan Freeman and Lauren Bacall TTS voices. (smirk)