Disability & Wellbeing ServiceRNIB Bookshare (UK Education Collection)

RNIB Bookshare (UK Education Collection) provides more than a million titles from more than 700 publishers.

With RNIB Bookshare, the Royal National Institute of Blind People opens up the world of reading in education for learners with a print-disability. These high-quality digital versions can be accessed via screen-reading and text-to-speech software to listen to the books or via magnification software to enlarge them without losing image quality.

RNIB Bookshare is available to all print-disabled students

Students with an independent RNIB Bookshare membership can:

  • search for texts across a wide range of subjects for university study and reading for leisure
  • listen to books with high quality text-to-speech voices
  • hear and see highlighted words on screen
  • read with digital braille or enlarged fonts
  • create physical braille or large print
  • read directly from an Internet browser

Staff can use RNIB bookshare to check on the availability of Tactile Images. For example, Science: anatomy and medicine related images

Copyright & terms of use

Under the Copyright and Related Rights (Marrakesh Treaty etc) (Amendment) Regulations 2018, the books on RNIB Bookshare are available for access by visual and print-disabled students worldwide.

Members must abide by the copyright permission systems of the books they download (i.e., they must not share them). Each download contains embedded information that allows it to be traced to an individual user account. This allows unlawful sharing of an item to be traced back to the user who originally downloaded it.

More legal information regarding books from RNIB Bookshare can be found on the RNIB Bookshare legal page.

Students are required to complete a copyright user-agreement as part of the membership registration.

FAQs

Firstly, you can check that you meet the eligibility requirements by checking Who is eligible to use RNIB Bookshare?

Membership requests must be processed via the Disability & Wellbeing department, as the university is required to hold evidence of your disability, before it submits the request.

If you think that you are eligible, you can contact the Disability & Wellbeing Service to request an membership of RNIB Bookshare. 

To register you with RNIB Bookshare, the Disability & Wellbeing Service will use your forename and your university student registration number only, and will also note your eligible print-disability category.

Members can search for texts via Title, Author or ISBN. The following videos are available to help members in getting started. (Please note: people of all ages use RNIB BookShare and so the videos are for all ages, including school-age children and so some guidance is directed to parents).

Watch help videos on YouTube

Learner (Member) homepage overview

Learners, download your first book from RNIB Bookshare

How to read books from RNIB Bookshare using our web reader tool

Finding/requesting books

How to find books on RNIB Bookshare

How to request books not yet in the RNIB Bookshare UK collection