Hello! I have been collecting etext books for over 15 years and wanted to have a device to save them on away from the computer. I have lost many books to computer crashes and thought that this would be a safer way both to store and read these books. This entire process has been a learning process for me. I had never heard of the Book Port until recently and did not know what a compact flash card was until about a month ago. I wish that this thread had materialized a bit sooner. I would have still purchased the book port, but would have gotten several smaller compact flash cards and not the 2 gb one. The Double Talk speech is quite good, not as good as Artic Business with the sonyx card or later on with the Dectalk Express. However it is still worlds ahead of the Echo speech I first started out with on my Apple II E. If you want to get some idea what that was like, find a old classic Braille n Speak and listen to Echo in all its glory! I have not had much time to do much reading with the book port, since I have been digging out floppies, cds and dumping them into folders on my computer and transfering them onto the bookport. I really like text files much better than digital ones as I can play them as fast as I want and can get so many more onto a card. I can literally carry my personal library in one hand and can access its books and read them from the device containing them. What else could one want? Thanks APH for this little guy and also thanks to all who have helped get me up and running with it! Ed,