Paul,

You are correct about RFB&D -- their tapes do require a special player but
they are the same ones as used by the Library of Congress.  There are many
alternative sources for these players and they come in all sizes from
walkman size to large desktop machines.  My favorite is the Handi-Cassette
II from the braille printing house in Louisville, Kentucky.  It s a bit
larger than a walkman (about twice the size) but has very good controls,
decent battery life, tone indexing and speech compression built-in.  Speech
compression allows you to listen to the material at faster than usual
speeds while it corrects the pitch to closer to normal instead of "Alvin
and the chipmunks".  You probably really wanted to know about the materials
and, so far, I have been able to get most of my textbooks through them.
The exceptions being the more recent ones in technical areas (computer
science) and other technically oreinted books that one can usually buy in
bookstores and computer stores.  Generally, I want these books in ASCII and
not on tape anyway.  The materials range from popular fiction and
non-fiction to textbooks for every level from secondary through graduate
studies.

As far as LOC is concerned, I have only used that service for pleasure
reading, and not too much of it at that.

Beware of the tapes you can buy in the bookstores -- many of them are
abridged or otherwise "interpreted" from the original paper versions, yet
they don't always disclose that in an obvious way -- you often have to read
the fine print.

While not exactly on tape, two other sources are Project Gutenberg which
has many classics available in ASCII and which can often be very useful in
certain english lit, philosophy, and history classes, and bookshare.org
which is about to come online soon and which looks to be a very promising
source for digital texts of all types.

http://www.bookshare.org

Hope this helps,

Jim

------------------------------
James A. Rebman

Cognitive Levers Project
Center for Life-Long Learning and Design
Department of Computer Science
University of Colorado, Boulder

"In times of change, the learners will inherit the earth while the learned
will find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists."

- Eric Hoffer