Using Your Textbooks to Their Fullest Potential

Many of you have been asking about the availability of audio book versions of your EMT and Paramedic text books.  While I have mentioned different solutions that range from hard to crazy hard. One listener who de-bound and scanned her entire book, used OCR software to interpret the scanned pages in to text again, and then recorded her computer’s text to speech program reading the book back to her.

I decided to ask about audio resources when I got a chance to interact with the publishers reps down at the EMS Today expo.

I spoke to all three publishers there (Jones and Bartlett, Brady, and McGraw-Hill).  None of them are planning a full audio version of their textbooks.  They all offer some form of web or cd-rom based audio content.  These are all what they are calling complimentary content.  A supplemental slice of information that offers additional info related to a given chapter, skill set, or lecture.

Brady is offering a set of downloadable audio supplements via Audible as  an audiobook for around $20 and by the chapter for $2.99.  These are listed as “VangoNotes” but can be found at Audible by searching “paramedic.” I found a link to Audible.com here that offers you a free audiobook when you sign up and you can cancel if you don’t use it.  A good option for studying and you can use your audiobook credits to get more if you like them.  (Full disclosure — the audible link to get the free book utilizes a link from a friend’s podcast site.  You get the opportunity to try out the service at Audible.com and he gets the advertising credit.)

Also, I found that many recently published textbooks are offering full text online to registered purchasers of the books via a scratch off code inside the cover of something like that.  I tried this feature out for one of my nursing texts and I was able to cut and paste the text from a section and then have my Macbook read it to me while I recorded the audio.