I stopped using Calibre a few years ago as I was receiving USB sticks from a multitude of organisations and starting to find it difficult to manage which stick belong to which organisation and was worried I’d return the wrong one in the wrong envelope. The Calibre streaming app was in its infancy and I could not get it to work for me so when I found out there was a new app for Android I thought I would give it a look. I found it on the Google Play store and noticed it had a star rating of 2.1 so was a bit dubious but downloaded it to my Android tablet anyway. I open the app and logged into it using my membership and PIN number which was simple enough but then was a bit bemused. At this point I must explain that I have no useful Vision, use a Synapptic \ Android tablet and I’m not used to using gestures like a demented magician so all I heard was a list of labels by the self-voicing app and double tapping seemed to have no effect. I then recalled that on the Play Store page there was mention of tutorials on YouTube. If you search for calibre audio library on YouTube you will be able to find a series of three tutorials on the app. These tutorials are excellent and realising I would have to swipe with various numbers of fingers up and down and left and right I went back to the app opened it up and started practicing what I had just learnt. From then on I found the app simple to use and has all the features you need from an audio book reader. So the trick to using this app is not to think that you know it all but go and make an effort to listen to the short tutorials. If like me you keep talk back on all the time don’t worry as it does not affec the self voicing side of the application. If I had any criticism of the app it was the the time it takes to scroll through all the different categories and writers but once you get to know what is available there is a perfectly adequate search function to speed this up. Another idea is to find out what books are available by searching on the Calibre website first. with this app been available for Android now I am happy to add calibre to my resources for audiobooks. Note for Synapptic users is that you can start the App directly from App Launcher in the Tools menu and do not have to turn on Talkback in order to find the Calibre icon on the Android screens. Afew of the people I have spoken to who have used Calibre in the past have moaned about the readers but they seem to have improved recently.
