DIGITAL EDUCATIONAL BOOKS – FREE, ACCESSIBLE & ALTERNATIVE FORMATS

Irish Book Publishers

CJ Fallon

As of today, in response to the COVID-19 crisis, teachers, parents and pupils can access the online versions of all CJ Fallon books for free. Simply click here and filter to your required title.

Note: not accessible, no access to text to speech

Edco

In an effort to provide a solution to make it as easy as possible for every student, teacher and parent to access our Primary, Junior and Leaving Cert e-books, we have created three free accounts which you can use to access everything you need to keep you going over the coming weeks.

LOG IN USING ANY OF THE DETAILS BELOW

Primary                       primaryedcobooks      edco2020

Junior Cert                  jcedcobooks                edco2020

Leaving Cert                Icedcobooks                edco2020

Note: Read aloud available – not text to speech

Gill & MacMillian

Gill Education is supporting teachers, parents and students by providing any online resource requested for free. Simply go to www.gillexplore.ie/products to find your resource or for further support contact digitalsupport@gill.ie.

Note: not accessible, no access to text to speech

Educate.ie

To help students’ study at home while schools are closed, we are providing free access to all our eBooks and student resources on this site.

Note: not accessible, no access to text to speech

Accessible Books

Childvision

ChildVision transcribes all textbooks for visually impaired children attending mainstream or special schools in Ireland. National Braille Production at ChildVision was established to meet the educational needs of children with a visual impairment attending either mainstream or special education at both primary and secondary level.

The formats currently catered for are: Braille, tactile diagrams, MOON, Large Print, DAISY books (accessible mp3 files) and customised text files for use with either speech output, magnification software or on different electronic braille output devices.

This is a demand-led and free service, open to all children with a registered visual impairment in the Republic of Ireland. ChildVision also provides an online bookshelf, where students can download an accessible book in the format of their choosing. Please note that orders can be placed by the visiting teachers for visually impaired only. For registration with the service please contact your/your child’s Visiting Teacher. For further information please contact braille@childvision.ie or call 01 837 3635 and ask for braille production.

Bookshare

The NCBI Bookshare website has an online repository of books in alternative formats. Create an account, log in and get access to over half a million book titles. A student has to Sign Up at Bookshare.ie. Once they sign up and submit their online form, their account is verified, and they can commence downloading their titles. A student must be eligible to use this service. To be eligible, the student must have a reading difficulty such as Dyslexia, a physical disability or have a vision impairment. They need to self- declare this in the sign-up form. A student selects a book, and then selects the format that they wish to read their book in. This could be in, Word, PDF, EPub, BRF ( Braille Ready File), MP3 or Daisy with images.

Project Gutenberg

A library of over 60,000 free eBooks. Choose among free ePub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. 

StoryWeaver

StoryWeaver has more than 19,000 storybooks to choose from in 230 languages, which you can read online and on your phone. You can download, print PDFs, and save the storybooks to read offline – all for free.

  • The Reading Programme is an easy-to-use, curated collection of books, themes and activities, tailored to suit the learning needs of children from Grades 1 to 8. Sign up for free and help children fall in love with books and reading!
  • The STEM Reading Lists have a collection of storybooks that spark curiosity and interest in children to explore concepts related to science, math and technology.
  • The Readalongs are audio-visual storybooks that early readers can listen to as they learn to read. These books have subtitles that mirror the audio narration of the story, which help children build language acquisition skills.

Libraries Ireland

While libraries are closed due to Coronavirus (COVID-19), you do not need to finalise your application in the library before being able to use online services  

  • Libraries Ireland AudioBooks
    • The eAudiobooks service is provided for library users by Bolinda through the Borrow Box service. You can access this service using your library barcode and library pin number.
  • Borrow Box
    • Use the borrow box app on your phone or tablet.

Audible Stories for kids

For as long as schools are closed, we’re open. Starting today, kids everywhere can instantly stream an incredible collection of stories, including titles across six different languages, that will help them continue dreaming, learning, and just being kids. Listen directly from the website!

Librivox.org

Free public domain audiobooks, read by volunteers from around the world.

International

Learning ally

Our solution provides students who struggle to read due to a reading deficit with equitable access to all the books they need to and want to read, including curriculum-aligned textbooks and literature, popular fiction and more. With an extensive library of human-read audiobooks and a suite of educator tools and resources, we help struggling readers become engaged, independent learners. $135, you can get unlimited audiobook downloads for 1 year.

Calibre UK

If you live in the EU – Anyone with a visual impairment can join and borrow our audiobooks in all formats: streaming, by mobile phone, memory stick and MP3 CD. Anyone with dyslexia or another disability can borrow audiobooks via streaming and download only.

Open eBooks

Educators, librarians and program leaders working with children and youth from in-need families can sign up with First Book to receive free access to the Open eBooks app. First Book is a non-profit organization that provides access to high quality, brand new books and educational resources – for free and at low cost – to schools and programs serving children in need. Once signed up with First Book, you will have access to Open eBooks, as well as access to the First Book Marketplace for low-cost books and resources, and the First Book National Book Bank for free books.

Free – Ebooks.net

Free Standard accounts are limited to 5 eBooks (of your choice) per month in the PDF format. Or join V.I.P. level to get UNLIMITED Book downloads and unlimited audiobook downloads as well all formats (better suited to Kindle, iPad, and all other mobile devices).

  • LIFETIME V.I.P. ACCESS! One payment, UNLIMITED eBook access forever: $49.95
  • Monthly V.I.P. ACCESS: $7.95 per month. Payments renew automatically.
  • FREE ACCESS: limited to 5 eBooks per month in the PDF format only

Creating your own materials

Balabolka

Balabolka is a free text-to-speech engine that boasts quality and flexibility worthy of a paid app. Balabolka allows you to save text as WAV, MP3, MP4, OGG or WMA. It can also read the clipboard content and view text from documents saved as DOC, EPUB, FB2, HTML, ODT, PDF or RTF files. It will automatically detect any TTS voices you have installed on your computer and, of course, you can download more voices, both free and paid, from the internet. Download and install balabolka from the link above to start creating your own audio files/books.

Tutorials on how to use Balabolka are available at Balabolka introduction tutorial and Balabolka convert to audio tutorial

RoboBraille

RoboBraille is an e-mail and web-based service capable of automatically transforming documents into a variety of alternate formats for the visually and reading impaired. RoboBraille is accessible 24/7 as a self-service solution and is available free of charge to individual, non-commercial user not affiliated with an institutional setting obligated to provide support (academic institution, organisation, association or similar). Users need not register in order to use the service. The objective is to support and promote self-sufficiency of people with special needs socially, throughout the educational system and on the labour market.

Upload a document and convert it to

  1. Accessible document

Otherwise inaccessible documents such as image files in GIF, TIFF, JPG, PNG, BMP, PCX, DCX, J2K, JP2, JPX, DJV, image-only PDF and all other types of PDF documents can be converted to more accessible formats including tagged PDF, DOC, DOCX, Word XML, XLS, XLSX, CSV, TXT, RTF and HTML. The service furthermore supports conversion of Microsoft Office documents into tagged PDF and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations into RTF files and web-projects.

  • Braille

Transcription of documents to contacted and uncontracted Braille in accordance with the Braille codes for Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Unified English (UEB), British English, American English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Spanish. The documents can furthermore be formatted and paginated, and delivered as ready-to-emboss files in a variety of digital Braille formats.

  • Audio

Conversion into plain MP3 files and well as DAISY Talking Books, including DAISY books with spoken math. The audio conversion features currently include high-quality voices for Arabic, Arabic/English bilingual, Bulgarian, British and American English, Czech, Chinese (Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese), Danish, Dutch, German, Greenlandic, French, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish (Castilian and Latin American), Swedish and Welsh.

  • E-book

Documents can be converted into both EPUB and Mobi Pocket (Amazon Kindle) e-book formats. To accommodate users with low vision, the base line of the body text in an e-book can be increased to allow for more appropriate text scaling in mainstream e-book readers. RoboBraille can also convert documents into EPUB3 e-books with media overlays.

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