Firstly, there is no cost of postage as articles for the blind is free. Also
if we went to digital we would ned an investment in.

A digital recording system usable by all.
A copying tower
A problem is that unless you go mp3, you only get 80 mins on a cd, and we
get 90 on a tape. Tapes are reusable, and if you multiply 140 times the
number of weeks in a year, even at ten pence its a lot of money and a lot of
completely useless bits of plastic that clutter up the environment.

You need a reusable format which can be copied fast.
it has to be reliable. One of the problems experienced by tns using cds is
that some simply fail. Very few tapes fail as long as you are careful that
you do not send out badly damaged ones.


Brian
"James Perrett" wrote in message
news
On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:56:21 -0000, Brian Gaff
wrote:



Yes, lots of options like dvd players, mp3 players, etc, but we do not
want
more time, as we record using volunteers, and need to get it out fast.


I know that I'm really late on this one but my father is probably one of
your target audience as he has very little sight left. He seems equally
comfortable with both CD's and cassettes but he is not interested at all
in computers.

I can understand some of your issues with CD's but I don't think that cost
should be one of them though - you can buy blank CD's in quantity for
under 10p each which is less than it would cost to post a reusable
CD/cassette back to you. It simply doesn't make sense to re-use CD's when
they are that cheap. I know that the quality of a 10p CD won't be as good
as a Taiyo Yuden CD but they're as good as any other brand that you can
buy.

There are also quite a few CD players with a resume feature which will
work provided you keep the same disc in the player. It might be worth
compiling a list of recommended CD players for your users with the
features that they need. Even without this resume feature you can still
place up to 99 track markers on a CD so you could almost certainly treat
each story as a single track.

Cheers

James.

--
http://www.jrpmusic.net