Kitob Plus

Audiobooks and radio plays are of particular importance in the everyday life of people with visual impairments, in their scientific activities, and in shaping their perception of the world and people. The invention of radio and the creation of sound recording gave birth to audiobooks. Such books were first read on the radio, presented on disks, and in the 50s of the last century they were reproduced on magnetic tapes and delivered to libraries and specialized enterprises where blind and visually impaired people work.

Such books came to Uzbekistan in the 60s of the last century, and in the period from 1970 to 2000, hundreds of books were voiced and recorded on magnetic tapes. With the advent of computers, writing audiobooks has become even easier. Books began to be presented on CDs. But the development of technology quickly made this method obsolete; now books are stored and distributed on flash drives, in phone memory, and on Internet sites.

Despite the historical stages in the development of audiobooks, people with visual disabilities have had to go to libraries, get them in audio format, read them and return them. People who knew how to use a computer collected these books on their computers and distributed them to other book lovers. Today, audiobooks have become so popular that they are listened to by all segments of society and not only people with visual disabilities.

However, in Uzbekistan there is still no online platform that would unite these books for blind and visually impaired readers. They have to download books from YouTube, Telegram or the old fashioned way by going to the library and downloading them on their devices. There are many audio books available on the YouTube platform, but when you are reading a novel with pleasure, advertisements come in and spoil the pleasure of listening to the book. In addition, there is no platform that offers the ability to search for books by genre, author, or speaker. In this regard, our team developed “KitobPlus” (in Russian, “KnigaPlus” means “accessible book”).