experience with Bard mobile

It really depends on where you live, to be honest. Where I live now, the book selection is decent. However, the state I used to live in before here, had a much, much better book selection.
Still, don't let that throw you off, the books really are not that bad. Also, lately BARD is starting to get a lot more commercially licensed audiobooks, meaning that the same narrators who narrate the books on services like Audible, also narrate the books on bARD. Keep in mind this will not be the case for all of their selection, just their newer acquired books.

HTH.

Is OK but could be better. They have a nice selection of scifi but sad no star trek. Nice collection from audible that they change into bard formit .

This is exactly what I meant above. Different states have different collections. Where I live, for example, has about 50 search results for the term "Star Trek". Not sure why it is not more centralized, but maybe that would be too much work for the service.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks (over 130 last year) and make very frequent use of the jump back (rewind) feature of the audiobook player while I'm listening. Most dedicated audiobook players have a rewind function that jumps back between 15 and 30 seconds which is ideal. And they do this seamlessly without interrupting playback. This is true for the Audible player, Libby from Overdrive, and the BookPlayer app for playing audiobooks in mp3 format. The BARD app interrupts playback when rewind is pressed and starts at 5 seconds which isn't long enough. to rewind further, the rewind button must be held down, delaying even further the resumption of playback. It's incredibly disruptive. I consider the BARD Mobile app to be an inferior player when compared to the other above mentioned players.

While I am not disagreeing that the rewind and Skip Forwardd feature is a little wonky, there are Siri shortcuts now to make it a little more streamlined. There is a "Jump" shortcut you can get from the bard app, that when you activate it, Siri will guide you to tell it how far back or forward you want to skip, 20 seconds, one minute, etc. etc., when it prompts you, you just say the length of time, and it will skip you back or forward to that amount and continue playing your book. It's not as streamlined as, say the Audible player, but it's at least something.

I became a patron of NLS not long after moving to Illinois with my family in 1985, and almost exclusively rely on audio. I can't say enough good things about the service. The record-player talking book machines and the cassette ones were of course bulky, and even the digital talking book players were a bit bulky. That said, everything is accessible. I'm now happily using BARD Mobile on an iPhone 14, and have never looked back. I've listened to some commercially-recorded books but mainly books as well as magazines produced in house. I've done a little bit with the HumanWare eReader which I acquired, and it seems to work well. The choice of narrators is very good imho, both the in-house ones and the few commercial ones I've heard. These include the legendary Coach K who narrated his own book, which I believe he co-wrote with his daughter. I'm of course referring to the former Duke University basketball coach. My only problem is with the sleep timer. It doesn't seem to save your place unless you leave the app open even when away from the phone and not reading. I've of course closed the app whenever I was finished with one book/magazine and ready to move onto the next one. I'm wondering if this is something that Apple needs to fix though. In any case, it's not been a show-stopper for me.

Would like them to set feature similar to what audible has. If I start in my iPhone and use my iPad, the audiobook in audible does nice job of picking up from I left up in the phone. If I do same with bard mobile can not do so.

The NLS collection building policy web page has a link to a book request form, but their policy is vague enough that you ultimately have no control whether something becomes available through BARD or not.

I think the most frustrating thing about new releases is that I have no idea when or if a new release will become available through BARD. I have burned many Audible credits reading books that were eventually made available in BARD for free.

The BARD Mobile app search capability used to be abysmal, but either it has improved, or I've finally learned how to use it, one or the other.

If you have downloaded a book, you can flick up or down to an option to show all books by that author. This method sometimes fails to list all books by the same author. I don't rely on it.

I find that VoiceOver focus is particularly flaky in the BARD Mobile app. I can't tell you how many times I've had focus on the Play button and been unable to flick left or right to the rewind or fast forward buttons, but dragging around the screen works without issue. Other times, focus seems to jump to the Recently Read button at the top, usually just when I'm about to double tap some other control, resulting in mass confusion within my cranium, until I eventually figure out what happened and perform a 2-finger scrub to get the player controls back.

Note that if you have several books downloaded, then upgrade to a new phone, you'll need to redownload those books. You might need to refer to the recently downloaded list to help you remember what you had.

It might sound like I'm griping. I just want to warn you of some unexpected behaviors. The truth is, this is an amazing free service that I depend on most every day. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

NLS did a complete overhaul on the app. I believe it was a few years ago. And now the app is a lot better than it used to be. I agree with Paul, there are some quirks, but overall it is an amazing app and an amazing Free service.

Bard Mobile is the best. Don’t fool around with that machine and physical tapes.

It is fantastic here in Arizona. I use the mobile app. Hundreds of books are on my wishlist and I always have one going. I also subscribe to Music Unlimited and they have started offering one Audible book every month so if I want a very new bestseller that hasn’t made it to BARD Mobile yet I can get it there.

You cannot change Audible books into BARD formatted books, however the BARD service sometimes will have commercially licensed books from Audible.

HTH.

NLS narrates books in-house, and this used to be how they added all titles to their library. In recent years, they have also started obtaining commercially available books through agreements with publishers as well. How quickly they are able to obtain these books I do not know. It is possible that a recent best-seller could be available on Audible and then, a few months later, become available on BARD as well.

When it was in tapes it needed to be change. Do not think is the same now, although do not think you can play an audiobook that you get from audible to bard mobile.

I just get one Audible book a month through Amazon Music Unlimited and listen to it there or on the Audible app, not Bard. But Bard does get many, many commercially available audiobooks. I’ve listened to books like Matthew McConaughey‘s Greenlights on Bard a couple weeks after it was released and it was narrated by Matthew McConaughey. It just depends but you will find oceans of audiobooks on Bard. Some new bestsellers do take some time to make it to Bard but you will be entertained in the meantime. They allow you 250 unique titles during any running 30 day period. I normally don’t need more than five to seven books. It is an incredibly generous service for blind and low vision people. My state library is fantastic and very helpful. Sometimes you will find several versions of the same book. They might be from various decades. Most of the time there is one version. I have found many bestsellers the flowing year of release but some are out in weeks or months. They add books daily and there is a search tab just for those. I usually search on titles or authors but once you find a book there is a feature to search all the authors books. You can search genres too. You don’t ever have a wait time and you never have to check any back in.

With regards to narrators, it really depends on your taste, as well as availability. For example, I am currently listening to a book by Dean Koontz titled, "After Death". I am listening to this on BARD, narrated by Randall Gordon.
This book came to Audible about a year and a half ago, July 2023 to be exact. Although this is not the same narrator who narrates the audible version, this particular narrator is actually quite good, and I enjoy listening to him.
There have been some lackluster narrators as well, but that comes with this type of service whether it's a commercially licensed service such as Audible, or a free government service such as NLS BARD.

That will be your experience as well, you will find some books you really, really enjoy, and some books you would rather pay for their premium counterpart just to have a better narrator. Or do what I do, and subscribe to Kindle unlimited. 😈

Yes. Agree. Strangers by Dean Koontz is done by a lady and the audible is by a guy but she does a better job. Some are good within Bard and some are good within audible.

If a book is available through Audible with a professional narrator, and NLS decides to add that book to their BARD catalog, they have two choices. They can work with the publisher to license the existing narration and audio recording for redistribution, or they can narrate and produce a new recording in-house. Both happen quite regularly, and it just depends on what agreements they can or can't make.

Obtaining the rights to redistribute the professional Audible recordings can be quite complex, as it will frequently require modifications to agreements that already exist between the author, the publisher, the narrator, and the production company.

On the other hand, narrating and producing in-house has its own cost in terms of time and resources.

There are 2 version of it, the one from audible and the one from Bard. Audible is better.

The series narrated by Jim Dale is absolutely phenomenal!

Most of the time I simply search in Bard using Keyword. If you really like a narrator you can search that name and see the books using that narrator. There are times when I’m listening and recognize the narrator. It is true that the narrator can make or break a book. It is a special skill to affect different voices and bring the book to life.
The big thing I would like to see is the Bard Mobile app syncing between devices.

Brian, thanks for your suggestion, but summoning Siri is even more disruptive than holding down the rewind button. In other words, using Siri is in no way a reasonable work-around for a proper audiobook rewind function.

The bottom line is that the BARD Mobile app is fine for accessing the BARD library, but it really sucks as an audiobook player.

Fair enough I guess. I have personally found that going into BARD settings, and enabling the automatic five second rewind, and just spamming the rewind button works well for me. I do respect that everybody's usecase is different though.

I believe you can listen to books off of the website. Not sure if it's just the website itself, or if they have a "web player", but I do believe this is doable, either way.

HTH.

Even though Bard Mobile doesn’t sync across devices you can still download a book to multiple devices without counting extra on your 30 day limit since it is unique titles that count.

I do really enjoy using the bard app for listening to audiobooks. It does come up where I left off but just in case I use the bookmark feature. I’ve been using bard daily for years. They are or were supposed to be doing a major overhaul of the app and updated their servers for this but I haven’t seen it yet.

Good day. I'm not sure that where you live makes a difference with digital titles you find through BARD. Sure, if we're talking about using the regional or state library and getting digital talking books mailed to you, then some areas of the US have a better selection than others. However, if you are searching for and downloading books with the BARD Mobile app, I don't think it matters where you live. For instance, I live in Texas, and have noticed a large amount of talking books written by Texas authors. If you lived in California and wanted to get books about another state like Texas, it seems logical that the system would let you get those books. In fact, now I'm recalling a book by a sci-fi author named Robert Sawyer, who lives and likely writes from Canada. I had not seen that particular book before available with BARD. Thanks to an international treaty signed around 10 years ago, anyone from any country can read books from another world location.
Regarding the book selection on BARD: it wouldn't surprise me at all if that number is in the tens of thousands. So, there's plenty to read. You're not likely to run out of materials any time soon.
Regarding the Bard app and odd behaviors, there are more options for turning on or off the rewind by 5 seconds when continuing to play a book that you had paused earlier. I have this turned on since I like to hear about where I left off and read from there. Regarding the rewind and fast forward functions, while they are a little quirky in how they are executed, you can work around that. For example, I often rewind a book between the default values of 20 seconds up to 5 minutes. There have been times when I wanted to rewind 2 or 3 minutes. In these cases, I will either rewind 1 minute and 3 separate 20 second segments. Or, I will rewind in 1 minute incriments. This is not as easy as rewinding by a minute at a time in the Audible app, but it is still doable. If you have suggestions for improvements or enhancements that could be made, you can always email:
NlsDownload@loc.gov
Good luck.

If you see some earlier posts, you will see where one person cannot find any Star Trek related books, yet where I live I can find at least 50 titles related to Star Trek. I think it does, in fact, matter where you live. 🙂

I only want to look for science fiction books in BARD, How do I do that?

It used to be that we could actually navigate by genre, but since they updated the app, that appears to be missing. Still just search for "Science Fiction" and go from there. Also if you have a preferred author, you could go that route.

HTH.

Check in the list of Braille books, and you should find it.
HTH.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but when I search for science fiction, all I get are 3 books by the same author. I'm in the US.

All star trek are old audiobooks. They do no longer record them. Last one that I recall was the fearful Summons.

In your first reply to this thread, you said,
""They have a nice selection of scifi but sad no star trek.""

You made it sound like there was no Star Trek at all. So I was saying that there were Star Trek books, at least that I can find in my states Library via BARD. 🤷

OK. Meant to say new star trek. Those that I have are from audible that I purchase.

As someone else said, you can no longer view books by subject in the BARD Mobile app. There are 2 solutions that come to mind.
First, navigate to the NLS BARD website. I'm sure you can find it via a Google, Bing, or other preferred search site. Once you do, I think you can look up science fiction books from there. If not, then search for your state or regional library, and they should have a link to the online catalog. I have heard that there are links to BARD books on these sites. I'm not sure if clicking on those links would take you directly to the BARD Mobile app. I have never done it that way before.
The other solution involves downloading the BARD Express Windows app. That app does have a subject list. To find the BARD Express site, use your preferred search tool and type in the following: Welcome to BARD Express. The results should have the site near the top. For instance, I did a Google search, and after I skipped passed the sponsor and quick links section, the BARD Express site was the first result. You will have to post in the Windows forum here with specific use questions. I recall a Tek Talk podcast from March of last year where they talked and demoed the app. Good luck.

I had no idea the website was the same layout as the, old, BARD app. Yeah this is easy to search by genre. My only complaint, and it is a personal preference more than anything else, is that Sci-Fi and Fantasy are not rolled into one category, say, like how Audible does it. 😥

Great scifi book for you that you might like by John Ringo. Also Jack Campbell the lost fleet and Tayler Anderson the destroyermen series.

Download one science fiction book, like Dune by Frank Herbert. Find it in your list of downloaded books. Then flick up to the option "view all books in science fiction." Disclaimer: I wouldn't entirely trust this. When I do essentially the same thing to list all books by the same author, I sometimes get incomplete results.

If you want to search science fiction in the bard Mobile app then search with those words using keyword and that will give you a list but not the one you want yet. Find that list and try tapping on the i that is surrounded by a circle in the upper right corner. Again in the upper right corner tap on the three dot eclipse. Scroll down and find search all science fiction. That should do it. There are tons of books in that genre if that’s what blows your skirt up.

I’m with Bookworm. No matter the state one resides they will have immediate access to every single book NLS has to offer anyone if they are using the bard Mobile app. This is a national service that is piped through state libraries but not choked down for some states. The issue is how folks here are searching and how they are able to articulate.

The search function should be a little bit easier but I was taught by my state library representative to only search via keyword. Over the years that may have changed but that’s how I do it, usually by author or specific title.

For those of us who depends solely on screen readers, the "I with a circle around it" would be a button labeled "more info". The button with three dots on it would be a button labeled "more actions".
To summarize above instructions:
1. Search for the keyword "science fiction".
2. When you get your list, find "more info "for any book in the list, does not matter which book.
3. Once you are in the "more info" dialogue, look for a button labeled "more actions".
4. Double tap "more actions", and then look for "search all in Science Fiction".

HTH.

Thanks Brian.

Your instructions are so much easier to understand than mine. Anyway that works well for me. Another way to start is with any sci-fi book you have and find the same menu through it. I’ve done this with other genres with good results.

I just started using bard mobile a month or 2 ago using a 4-year-old SE 2 iPhone with a battery that's maybe 2 years old. There are some days when the battery drains completely by the end of the day without giving me any low battery warnings at all, and I've started using at least one other new app and I'm trying to find out which one of these 2 apps may be the culprit of the fast battery drain. Has anybody noticed bard mobile being a battery hog? There was one day fairly recently when my phone went dead within around 6 hours but I don't remember if I had used bard mobile a lot that day.

You can get some insights in Settings, Battery. Sadly, this section of the Settings app has no headings, so you'll need to flick past a lot of information about battery level in the past 24 hours and usage in the last 24 hours. Finally, you'll get to a list of apps and the percent of battery consumption they're responsible for, and you can see how much battery BARD Mobile has used.

But let's cut to the chase. BARD might be an issue for battery consumption. When BARD is playing a book, the phone doesn't sleep automatically. You'll need to explicitly sleep your phone with the side switch. Presumably, the app will use less battery if it sleeps while it's playing.

If sleeping your phone stops the book from playing, go into BARD settings (tab 3 of 4 along the bottom of the app), select audio settings, and turn on background playback.

If this has not already been said, you can go into BARD settings, and enable the autolock feature, so that your phone will go to sleep, but still play your book, just like commercial apps like Audible does. Just an FYI.

I doubt it's BARD. I can go hours listening to a book, while I'm doing other stuff around my home, and it barely touches my battery. By the way, I am running iOS 18.2.1 on an iPhone SE 2022.
Chances are it's the other app.

.@Alicia Krage

Just to clarify some things:

* NLS is the National Library System, thus all audio books in the system are available to all U.S. citizens regardless of state or location
* On the BARD web site:
https://nlsbard.loc.gov/nlsbardprod/mainpage
one has more search options than one does when using the BARD Mobile app. On their web page interface you can search by category (such as "science fiction"). Once a book is found there, you can put it on your "Wish List" and download books from your Wish List using the BARD Mobile app.

* They have a very wide range of books available. Especially these days since they have partnered with several audio book publishers to quickly get their audio into the BARD system, more and more commercial books are being made available in a quicker time frame. These partnerships have really increased the number and range of available books. BARD does still also record some of their own audio books to supplement what they can get from publishers.

* Some regional libraries also make their own recordings that might be particular to the region. These are books that usually wouldn't be of general interest, but when the regional libraries record them, they are now in the system and available to all.

* There are various ways to search for books in the BARD Mobil app. These include doing a manual search by title, author, keyword, etc. There is also a category for books recently added to BARD, a category for most popular books at BARD, etc.

* The Wish List in the BARD Mobil app can be particularly useful as noted above.

* There is also a BARD app for Windows if you don't like the web interface or don't want to search for books in the mobile app.

* Once you find a book by a particular author, if you look in the "More" dialog associated with the book there are options for bringing up a list of all books by that author, getting notices when a new book comes out by that author (usually but not for all authors), and bringing up a list of all books in that genre.

* Note: There are also a variety of music related resources from BARD.

* You can also place bookmarks in books to save your places.

Hope that helps. The app works very well in iOS and is easy to use.

--Pete