Reading to Ruth › Advice for families

A simple audiobook player for an elderly parent or grandparent

When someone who has always loved books can no longer read them, audiobooks are the obvious answer. Finding the books is easy. Finding a player they can work on their own, on a Tuesday afternoon with nobody else in the room, is the hard part.

By Tara Button, Ruth's granddaughter and the founder of Reading to Ruth · Updated 11 October 2026

What families usually try first

Most of us start with what we use ourselves. Each of these works well for some people. Each also asks for something that gets harder with age.

• An audiobook app on a phone or tablet. Small print, menus, sign-ins and updates. The books are easy to buy and hard to find again, and they stay inside the app they were bought in.
• A smart speaker. No screen, which is good. It depends on remembering the right words and hearing the reply, which is difficult for someone who is hard of hearing or whose memory is not what it was.
• A talking-book player made for blind people. Built with great care, and often free to borrow. Many still have a dozen buttons to learn by touch.
• CDs. Familiar, but a single novel can run to ten discs or more, and the place is lost whenever a disc is changed or the player is knocked.

My grandmother Ruth is 101, almost completely blind and hard of hearing. She found the blind book player too complicated, and she couldn't hear her smart speaker well enough. One day she told me, “I'm just so bored.” That is why I built Reading to Ruth.

What to look for in a player

Whatever you choose, these six things decide whether it is still being used a month later.

1. One obvious button. If Play is the only thing to find, it gets found.
2. It keeps the place. People doze off. The story should be waiting where they left it, without anyone having to look for it.
3. Nothing to sign in to. No passwords, no accounts and no updates on their side.
4. Someone else can fill it, from somewhere else. If adding a book means being in the room, it will wait until your next visit.
5. Sound they can hear. A speaker, headphones or hearing aids, and a reading that can be slowed down.
6. No way to get lost. A wrong press should do no harm.

How Reading to Ruth does it

Reading to Ruth is an audiobook player with one big button. It is a website, so it runs on the tablet, phone or laptop they already have, and there is nothing to install. Ruth's is a ten-year-old iPad.

For them

A big Play button. Press it to listen, press it again to pause. It says each title aloud and keeps the place in every book. You choose how much sits around the button:

• Simplest: the whole screen is one Play button.
• Standard: the big Play button, with two small ones for Go Back a Bit and Next Book. This is Ruth's.
• Independent: the standard player plus their own bookshelf and settings, for someone who is happy with a tablet but tired of fiddly apps.

If things get harder for them, you can move from one to the next. The books, and the place in each one, stay as they were.

For you

A private family page that works from any phone. Choose which books are in the player, from a free library of classics or by telling us the book they want, which we add at the normal shop price. Record a voice message and it plays before their story. Paste in an article or a poem and it is read aloud. You can see when they have been listening.

Try the real player on the home page

What it needs, and what it doesn't do

• It needs a device. A tablet, smartphone or laptop. None is included, and one they already own is fine. If they have nothing, a basic Amazon Fire tablet costs about £100.
• It needs wi-fi where they live, whether that is their own home or a care home.
• It needs one person to set it up, for ten to fifteen minutes, once. After that they only need the Play button.
• It can't play library loans from apps such as BorrowBox or Libby, or books bought inside Audible. Those stay in their own apps. Audiobook files you own outright go straight onto the shelf.