For someone who has loved reading all their life, failing eyesight is a difficult pill to swallow. I found myself in exactly that scenario recently, trying to work out how best to help my Mum, who adores reading, keep enjoying books as her eyes got worse. The answer turned out to be audiobooks, and more specifically a setup simple enough that she never has to think about the tech at all.
That setup is an Amazon Echo speaker, an Audible membership and a small smart button called Flic. One press of the button starts her audiobook on Alexa and sets a timer so it stops after 30 minutes. There’s no screen to squint at, no app to navigate and no remembering the right phrasing for a voice command.
The result is that Mum is back enjoying books like before. The experience has changed a little, and I’ll be honest about the snags I hit along the way, but a good audiobook turns out to be just as enjoyable as sitting down with a book.
Why e-readers only go so far when eyesight fades
Ereaders can be a great crutch for a long time. Bigger text and a backlit screen buy a reader years they wouldn’t otherwise have with paperbacks. Eventually, though, the reading itself becomes too difficult for the eyes, however large you make the font.
There are also cognitive issues that come with age, and they can make even the best eyesight not enough for reading. Following a page, holding your place and keeping track of what happened three chapters ago all get harder. Listening takes a lot of that strain away, which is why audiobooks for elderly readers make so much sense once print stops working.
Mum is a good example of how gradual this is. She’s quite advanced when it comes to tech. She would have you say otherwise, but she was a pioneer of digital banking and was one of the first in the house to have a Kindle. She absolutely milled through books on it. After various operations on her eyes, though, it was clear that reading was becoming quite difficult, and the Kindle had done all it could.
Why Alexa and Audible work so well for older listeners
The short answer is that Alexa turns the hardest part of audiobooks, finding and starting the right book, into a single spoken sentence. Fortunately, Mum had gotten used to using an Alexa years ago, so the speaker was already part of her day.
Love or hate Jeff Bezos or indeed Amazon, Amazon’s technology and company make access to books and audiobooks absolutely brilliant. Audible plays straight through any Echo speaker, remembers exactly where you left off and doesn’t need a phone or tablet anywhere near it once it’s set up.
You do need an Audible subscription, and it turned out to be a great investment. Irish listeners sign up through the UK store, where an Audible Premium Plus membership costs £8.99 a month after a 30-day free trial. That gets you one credit a month to keep any book outright, plus access to a catalogue of included titles you can listen to at no extra cost. Mum needed every bit of it, because she was back milling through books in no time.
Adding a Flic smart button for a more tactile experience
I had no doubt that Mum would be able to say “Alexa, start my audiobook”. That said, I wanted to make it a more tactile experience, something closer to picking up a book than talking to a speaker. So I looked into an old gadget from many years ago that I loved.
Flic is a small wireless smart button that can do lots of different tasks. You stick it wherever suits, and each button can trigger different actions depending on whether you press it once, press it twice or hold it down. Through Flic’s Alexa integration, any of those presses can kick off an Alexa routine, which is where the magic happens.
Being totally transparent, I bought the Flic Twist, and it’s total overkill. It has a rotating ring that’s supposed to control volume, and I couldn’t get that working with Alexa no matter what I tried. Mum doesn’t need it, and is well used to turning up and down the volume with voice commands. Most won’t need this setting this up for a parent.
The basic Flic button does the job that matters, starting and stopping the book, without any fuss.
How to set up a Flic button to play audiobooks on Alexa
The setup takes a few minutes, and the one thing I’d insist on is the Flic Hub. A Flic button can pair through a phone, but that phone then needs to be nearby for the button to work. The hub sits in the house permanently, and it proved far more reliable for us. For someone living on their own, that reliability is the whole point.
Once the hub is in, you pair the button, enable the Flic skill in the Alexa app, and assign an Alexa routine to a press, double press or long press. Keeping it simple, I set a single press to trigger a routine that says “Play [audiobook name here]”. Mum presses the button, Alexa picks up the book where she left off, and that’s it. She doesn’t need to know a routine exists.
The best bit is that I manage her entire Alexa experience from my own phone. Thanks to a feature on some phones, like Honor and Xiaomi, I run a second copy of the Alexa app signed into her account, so it doesn’t touch my own Alexa setup at all.
When a book finishes, I “buy” the next audiobook with her credits, type the next title into the routine before she reaches the last chapter, and she never has to search for anything or pick from thousands of titles. In general, shadowing her tech needs through secondary apps on my own phone has been brilliant, and it’s the approach I’d recommend to anyone supporting an older parent.
Add a timer to the same button press
Arguably, Mum has gotten a little too comfy at times! Nodding off with a book playing isn’t a disaster, but waking up four chapters further on causes a job I need to fix.
So I do recommend that a single press not only starts the audiobook but starts a timer too. Add a sleep timer of 30 minutes to the same Alexa routine, and the book stops by itself. If she wants to keep going, she just presses the button again. It saves you having to troubleshoot on the fly when you get a confused phone call about a book that’s suddenly miles ahead.
Free audiobooks through Irish libraries
Audible isn’t the only option, and it’s not the cheapest. Joining your local library is free, and Irish library members can borrow audiobooks at no cost through the BorrowBox app, alongside audiobooks on CD in branch.
The trade-off is simplicity. BorrowBox lives on a phone or tablet, so someone with poor eyesight will likely need a hand navigating it. For a listener who is comfortable with a tablet, it’s brilliant value. For Mum, the one-button Alexa setup won out because there’s nothing to look at.
Start early if you think a loved one will need this
In hindsight, this is a great solution for everyone who enjoys an audiobook, kids included. A button that plays the bedtime story and switches off after 30 minutes is as handy in a child’s room as it is in Mum’s sitting room.
I’ve done a lot of reading in this area, and the biggest lesson is timing. If you feel a loved one might need something like this down the line, introduce the concept and the gadgets as early as possible. What helped us massively is that Mum has had an Alexa for years. She’s comfortable asking it anything, from the time to her audiobooks, the weather and music playlists. Adding a button on top of that was a small step, not a whole new thing to learn while her eyesight was already making life harder.
Technology has been fantastic for making tasks easier for my Mum, right down to medication management. If there’s a reader in your life whose eyes are starting to struggle, get the speaker in now. The books can follow.
