Textbooks
Students with difficulties reading due to visual impairment or reading disabilities can borrow accessible textbooks from NLB. The service is free for students attending university, university college and vocational college.
Book selection
We continuously expand our selection, and offer both e-books and talking books with text covering numerous subjects.
Find books
Search for books in our collection and sign them out yourself. You can stream our books, but we do recommend downloading. We also borrow books from MTM, our partner library in Sweden. However, these are only available as CDs.
Search for textbooks in NLB’s database
Search in the database of the Swedish library MTM (Legimus)
As a library user at NLB, you can also borrow from the American digital library, Bookshare. Bookshare has access to 630,000 fiction and non-fiction e-book titles with speech synthesis. Contact us if you want to become a Bookshare-member.
Talking books or e-books
Choose whether you want to borrow textbooks as talking books with text or e-books. Individual needs and preferences makes it difficult to recommend one over the other, so find out what works best for you!
Talking books with text
Talking books with text are usually made with speech synthesis, a program that turns digital text into speech. The text is included so that you can both listen and read the text on-screen. Read more about speech synthesis and hear examples of the voices we use here (In Norwegian).
Speech synthesis can take some time getting used to, but most people find it is a good tool for consuming text.
We have two new voices for Norwegian books, Clara (Bokmål) and Hulda (Nynorsk), these will be available in the autumn of 2020. If you would like these new voices on books previously produced with the Brage-voice, please contact us.
E-books
Starting in 2020, NLB now offers a large selection of textbooks in e-book format. The e-books contain only text and can be read on PC/MAC, tablet/mobile, Kindle/PocketBook, and Braille display. Within Lydhør you can hear the text with our built-in speech synthesis. If you find older books in our collection where the e-book format is not an option, we can produce the e-book per request.
E-books download faster and take up less space than talking books.
Read more about e-books and how to borrow and use them. (In Norwegian)
Production of textbooks
Blind and severely partially sighted students are entitled to the production of textbooks. An ophthalmologist or teacher for the visually impaired must confirm the visual impairment. See criteria for right to production of literature (in Norwe
Do you need help?
We can answer questions and help you locate books on your reading list.
E-mail: studenttjenesten@nlb.no
