Welcome to the Villages VIP audio and video library. Everything here is free.
Browse by topic — newest items are at the top of each section.
BARD & Talking Books
An Intro to BARD — a free audiobook reader for the visually impaired (Video)
Added fall 2025. A short introduction to the BARD service: what it is, how to
set it up, and how to start listening.
Going Mobile with BARD 2.0 (Guide)
The BARD website (BARD 2.0) has been greatly improved, and searching for a
book is much better. Visit nlsbard.loc.gov and log in. Try this: search on the
website, add the book to your wish list, and your account will sync it to your
smartphone or tablet. Prefer a bigger screen? Your computer browser works too.
BARD 5 Cozy Mystery Book Picks ( a bit premature)
You can find new book releases on BARD (Braille and Audio Reading Download). The National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS) regularly adds new audio and braille titles to the platform.
You can explore new additions through a few different methods:
BARD Website and Apps:
Please note: these are brand-new releases, and new books usually take a few weeks to appear on BARD. If a title isn’t there yet, add it to your BARD wish list — it’ll be ready for you the day it lands. One could search the author. So come back to this list later.
You can explore new additions through a few different methods:
- The NLS Catalog: You can search the main catalog to find recently added titles.
- Publications: The NLS publishes Talking Book Topics and Braille Book Review, which list selections of titles recently added to the collection.
- BARD Website and Apps: Once logged into the BARD website or the BARD Mobile app, you can browse the latest releases directly.
#1. Death on the Royal Yacht, by S. J. Bennett. Queen Elizabeth the Second quietly solves a murder aboard the Royal Yacht, on a 1966 Caribbean tour. Witty and charming. About ten and a half hours.
#2. Miss Wolcott’s Ghost, by Louise Penny. The twenty-first Gamache novel. A body from another century turns up in a remote cemetery, and Gamache is pulled into old secrets. Literary and humane. Nearly fourteen hours.
#3. Numb Were the Beadsman’s Fingers, by Alan Bradley. Flavia de Luce, the precocious child chemist, and her dog investigate a nun’s murder in a nineteen-fifties English village. Out in November.
#4. Eat, Drink, and Get Buried, by Cleo Coyle. The twenty-second Coffeehouse Mystery. A rooftop party, a murder, and coffeehouse owner Clare Cosi clearing a friend’s name. About nine and a half hours.
#5. Murder on Thin Ice, by Laurie Cass. A Michigan bookmobile librarian and her cat look into a frozen lake death the police call an accident.
Sometimes using AI is inaccurate. As with the books listed above.
Audio Descriptors
What Are Audio Descriptors? (Video)
Watch or listen to learn about audio descriptors. Based on a Villages Daily Sun
article from October 29, 2025 (page A-18).