From the Director's Desk
Good day to you all!
It is busy here at Kansas Talking Books and that is GREAT news! We’ve got new employees, a new website, new program ideas, new ways for you to get involved with Kansas Talking Books, and a heap of outreach events for us to meet each other. You’ll find all that information, and more, below.
In addition to all of that, Maggie, Nataly, and I will be traveling to Washington D.C. this month to attend the National Conference of Librarians Serving Blind and Print Disabled Individuals. It is an incredible opportunity to learn from experts across the country, share ideas, and bring back fresh insights.
Conference sessions will focus on accessibility, emerging technologies, and best practices in library services for the visually impaired and print-disabled communities. The knowledge gained from these sessions will undoubtedly enhance our services, and we look forward to implementing new strategies to better serve you.
I welcome any questions, commendations, comments, or concerns you may have about the service. You can email me at michael.lang@ks.gov or call me directly 620-341-6287.
Keep reading and have a great day!
–Michael Lang, Director
KTB Updates.
New Website.
The State Library of Kansas, with Kansas Talking Books, has moved to a new website. Our new web address is https://library.ks.gov/talking-books.
The new site is organized similarly to the previous version. However, if you need help finding information on the new website, Kansas Talking Books staff are happy to assist you.
Welcoming New Faces.
Please join me in welcoming our newest staff members Ryan Lauber and Troy Arndt.
Ryan is working as our NFB-Newsline coordinator, a brand-new position. He’ll be managing our Newsline local channel content, user accounts, and growing our subscriber base through various outreach efforts
Troy is our new circulation clerk. He ensures that books and magazines are sent out and checked in efficiently to ensure the best service possible for our users.
Both bring a wealth of experience and enthusiasm to our program. We are thrilled to have them on board and are confident that their skills will be a tremendous asset to Kansas Talking Books.
Wanted: Community Outreach Ambassador Volunteers.
KTB is seeking volunteers for a Community Outreach Ambassador pilot program. We’re searching for enthusiastic individuals who are:
- Passionate about literacy and accessible reading.
- Comfortable speaking and engaging with diverse individuals.
- Able to work independently.
- Willing to dedicate a few hours each month to help us make a difference.
We’re still in the planning stage but our vision is that these volunteers will help advance the mission of Kansas Talking Books in three specific ways.
Information Distribution: Share brochures, flyers, and other materials to educate others about our services. Identify locations where materials can be displayed in your community.
Personal Outreach: Connect directly with potential users and their families to explain how they can access our resources. Connect with “information agents” in your community to let them know about the service.
Feedback Collection: Gather insights from the community to help us improve and expand our services.
KTB will provide volunteer ambassadors with online training, promotional materials, and ongoing support.
If you are interested in learning more, please contact Michael by email or call 620-341-6287.
Subscribe to Kansas Living Magazine.
KTB has a new audio magazine available for our readers. Kansas Living, the quarterly membership magazine of the Kansas Farm Bureau, features stories from around Kansas, delicious healthy recipes, and much more. To subscribe to this, or any of our other magazines, contact Amanda by email or call 620-341-6282.
New Items on NFB-Newsline.
KTB is expanding the number of publications available on our NFB-Newsline local channel. In the past month we’ve added the following resources for you to enjoy.
The Active Age. A monthly news publication with a mission to help readers in Sedgwick, Butler, and Harvey Counties live healthy, active and fulfilling lives.
Amazing Aging! from the Jayhawk Area Agency on Aging is a quarterly publication “For Seniors and Those Who Love Them.”
The Communicator from the Wyandotte Leavenworth Area Agency on Aging is a bi-monthly publication that provides readers with items predominantly of interest and affecting the well-being of senior citizens in Wyandotte and Leavenworth counties.
The Kansas Elections channel now includes up to date voter information from the Secretary of State’s office.
A complete list of our audio described movies has been added as well.
NFB-Newsline, a service of the National Federation of the Blind, is a free audio news service for anyone who is print-disabled. Newsline provides eligible subscribers with access to more than 500 publications and various other information sources. Visit the NFB-Newsline website or contact Ryan Lauber by email at ryan.lauber@ks.gov or phone at 620-341-6286, for more information.
KTB Outreach Calendar.
We have a lineup of exciting outreach events planned across the state this fall. We’ll be visiting libraries, health fairs, professional conferences, and more. Stop by and meet us if we’re in your neck of the woods.
September:
Tuesday, Sept. 24th - Sunflower Fair. Tony’s Pizza Event Center, Salina. Attendee pre-registration information available here.
Tuesday, Sept. 24th - SE Kansas Senior Health Fair. St. John’s Catholic Church Parish Hall, Iola from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m.
Thursday, Sept. 26th – Talking Books Roadshow at Eudora Public Library form 10 a.m. to Noon.
Thursday, Sept. 26th –Talking Books Roadshow at Lansing Public Library from 1 p.m. until 3 p.m.
October:
Thursday, Oct. 17th - The Wyandotte County Unified Gov't Health Fair Memorial Hall, KC from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
Thursday, Oct. 17th - Kansas Talking Books Roadshow - KCKPL, 2:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Wednesday, October 23rd - Fint Hills Senior Life Fair, Anderson Building at the Lyon County Fairgrounds, Emporia from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m.
Wednesday, Oct. 30th & Thursday Oct. 31st – Kansas Library Association Conference, Wichita.
November:
All month long – NovemBARD: A celebration of all things BARD.
Saturday, Nov. 2nd - NFB-KS State Convention. Double Tree, Lawrence, KS.
Monday, Nov. 8th Kansas Vision Symposium, Wichita.
Tuesday, Nov. 9th - Kansas Optometric Association Fall Eyecare Conference, Wichita.
Nov. date TBD : Talking Books Roadshow in Council Grove.
Nov. date TBD : NFB-Newsine Information Session, online.
Quarterly Virtual Book Club.
All Kansas Talking Books patrons are invited to join our quarterly virtual book club. Meet other patrons and enjoy lively discussion about books. If you are interested in participating, contact Maggie Witte at 620-341-6281 or maggie.witte@ks.gov.
Wednesday, September 25 at noon.
DB 109032 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Annotation: On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. Unrated. Commercial audiobook. Bestseller. 2022.
Wednesday, December 11 at noon.
DBC02962 The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol rescued his career and revived our holiday spirits by Les Standiford
News from NLS.
BARD Express Player.
NLS has launched the newest version of BARD Express, featuring the long-awaited BARD Express Player, which allows KTB patrons to choose an audiobook or magazine from their BARD Express bookshelf and listen to it directly on a PC. Much like BARD Mobile, the BARD Express Player lets you adjust the narration speed, jump to navigation points such as chapters or articles, create bookmarks and much more. You can also create global settings for narration speed, auto-play, auto-rewind and other specifics to make your experience more personalized. Find out more about the new player by visiting the NLS BARD Express website There you can access the updated user guide or learn more about updating scripts for older JAWS screen reader versions. BARD Express is only available on computers that run Windows operating system.
Updates to NLS Magazines.
The Dell Crosswords and Interweave braille magazines will no longer be produced by NLS. These magazines are being replaced by magazines of the same scope, Crossword Extravaganza magazine and Laine magazine. Past issues of Dell Crosswords and Interweave will remain available on BARD.
In total, five new braille magazines are being added to the NLS collection. They will be available on BARD as ebraille and in hard copy braille via subscriptions.
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine: Bimonthly magazine specializing in crime and detective fiction.
Animal Wellness Magazine: Bimonthly magazineProviding educational content to help your beautiful dog and cat live the most naturally long, healthy, and happy life possible.
Crossword Extravaganza: Triannually. Enjoy a wealth of fun, challenging crosswords with dozens of themed selections from The Crosswords Club and Dell Crosswords. Plus, Crossword Extravaganza includes 20 variety crosswords such as Cryptics, About-Face, Stenographic, Punanagrams, and more.
Laine: Quarterly. Includes patterns from leading knitwear designers; insightful, long-format stories from the world of wool; interviews; seasonal recipes; and strong, visual storytelling.
Piano Technical Journal: Monthly technical magazine covering all phases of working on pianos. Monthly articles explore new tools, industry news, and organizational issues. Feature articles range from setting up a repair shop to rebuilding techniques.
NLS expects for the first issues of these new magazines to be available by late fall.
Upcoming NLS Events.
That All May eRead. Tuesday, September 24 at 6 p.m.
Many Faces of BARD. Thursday, October 10 at 6 p.m.
Quarterly Patron Corner. Monday, December 9 at 6 p.m.
To get the latest NLS news and program updates directly to your inbox, sign up for the NLS Patron Announce email list. Send your name and email address to the Patron Engagement Section at NLSPES@loc.gov. You can unsubscribe yourself from the list at any time.
Readers’ Advisor Recommends: Manhattan Book Club Picks.
The Manhattan Book Club is open to all Kansas Talking Books patrons regardless of where you live. They meet using Zoom, which can be accessed by calling in or using a computer/smart device. Here are their selections for the upcoming year. To get more information on joining contact Maggie.
September 17, 2024.
DB116405 The Coming Wave: Technology, power, and the twenty-first century’s greatest dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman
We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organize your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. None of us are prepared. As co-founder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, part of Google, Mustafa Suleyman has been at the center of this revolution. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies. Unrated. Commercial audiobook.
October 15, 2024.
DB110401 The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna
"As one of the few witches in Britain, Mika Moon knows she has to hide her magic, keep her head down, and stay away from other witches so their powers don't mingle and draw attention. And as an orphan who lost her parents at a young age and was raised by strangers, she's used to being alone and she follows the rules...with one exception: an online account, where she posts videos "pretending" to be a witch. She thinks no one will take it seriously. But someone does. An unexpected message arrives, begging her to travel to the remote and mysterious Nowhere House to teach three young witches how to control their magic. It breaks all of the rules, but Mika goes anyway, and is immediately tangled up in the lives and secrets of not only her three charges, but also an absent archaeologist, a retired actor, two long-suffering caretakers, and...Jamie. The handsome and prickly librarian of Nowhere House would do anything to protect the children, and as far as he's concerned, a stranger like Mika is a threat. An irritatingly appealing threat. As Mika begins to find her place at Nowhere House, the thought of belonging somewhere begins to feel like a real possibility. But magic isn't the only danger in the world, and when peril comes knocking at their door, Mika will need to decide whether to risk everything to protect a found family she didn't know she was looking for." -- Provided by publisher. -- Unrated. Commercial audiobook.
November 19, 2024.
DBC27444 Stringing Rosaries: The history, the unforgivable, and the healing of Northern Plains American Indian boarding school survivors by Denise K. Lajimodiere
Denise Lajimodiere's interest in American Indian boarding school survivors stories evolved from recording her father and other family members speaking of their experiences. Her research helped her to gain insight, a deeper understanding of her parents, and how and why she and her siblings were parented in the way they were. That insight led her to an emotional ceremony of forgiveness. The journey to record survivors stories led her through the Dakotas and Minnesota and into the personal and private space of boarding school survivors. While there, she heard stories that they had never shared before. She came to an understanding of new terms: historical and intergenerational trauma, soul wound. Stringing Rosaries presents a brief history of the boarding school programs for Indigenous Americans, followed by sixteen interviews with boarding school survivors, and ending with the author's own healing journey with her father. Adult. Unrated.
December 17, 2024.
DB 97443 The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams
Baseball player Gavin Scott's marriage is in trouble, and to fix things, he's going to need some assistance. He finds a secret book club of other men who have used romance novels to fix their own relationships, and they agree to help him win back his family. Unrated. Commercial audiobook.
January 21, 2025.
DB113965 The Wager: A tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder by David Grann
On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes. But then ... six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. Some violence. Commercial audiobook. Bestseller.
February 18, 2025.
DB107522 The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn
Kiev, 1937. Bookish history student Mila Pavlichenko organizes her life around her library job and her young son--but Hitler's invasion sends her on a different path. Given a rifle and sent to join the fight, Mila becomes a deadly sniper--a lethal hunter of Nazis known as Lady Death. Unrated. Commercial audiobook. Bestseller.
March 18, 2025.
DB115655 The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Strong language, some violence. Commercial audiobook. Bestseller.
April 15, 2025.
DB116354 The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger
On Memorial Day, as the people of Jewel, Minnesota, gather to remember and honor the sacrifice of so many sons in the wars of the past, the half-clothed body of wealthy landowner Jimmy Quinn is found floating in the Alabaster River, dead from a shotgun blast. Investigation of the murder falls to Sheriff Brody Dern, a highly decorated war hero who still carries the physical and emotional scars from his military service. Even before Dern has the results of the autopsy, vicious rumors begin to circulate that the killer must be Noah Bluestone, a Native American WWII veteran who has recently returned to Jewel with a Japanese wife. As suspicions and accusations mount and the town teeters on the edge of more violence, Dern struggles not only to find the truth of Quinn's murder but also put to rest the demons from his own past. Unrated. Commercial audiobook. Bestseller.
May 20, 2025.
DB 75277 Double Cross: The true story of the D-Day spies by Ben Macintyre
Author of Operation Mincemeat (DB 71406) recounts the deception the Allies used to keep secret the planned location of their 1944 invasion of France. Details the efforts of Tommy "Tar" Robertson of Britain's MI5 to turn playboys, party girls, and eccentrics--all of whom were Nazi spies--into double agents. Bestseller.
June 17, 2025.
DB 78375 An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris
Fictionalized account of the events surrounding French officer Alfred Dreyfus's treason conviction in 1895. Georges Picquart is the newly appointed head of the counterespionage agency that accused Dreyfus, a Jew, of passing secrets to the Germans. But Picquart later finds information that changes everything. Bestseller.
July 15, 2025.
DB114458 Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World by William Alexander
The tomato gets no respect. Never has. Lost in the dustbin of history for centuries, accused of being vile and poisonous, subjected to being picked hard-green and gassed, even used as a projectile, the poor tomato has become the avatar for our disaffection with industrial foods - while becoming the most popular vegetable in America (and, in fact, the world). Unrated. Commercial audiobook.
Local Books on BARD.
Check out the newest Kansas produced books added to BARD.
DBC17297 Frontier Manhattan: Yankee Settlement to Kansas Town, 1854-1894 by Kevin G. W. Olson.
When Isaac Goodnow and five fellow New Englanders arrived at the junction of the Kansas and Big Blue rivers in March of 1855, they pitched a tent and launched a town. Harassment and homesickness almost drove them back east, but they held their ground to establish an antislavery and educational stronghold: the town of Manhattan, Kansas. Some violence.
DBC17347 Shelter by Christie Matheson.
Fifth grade can be tough for anyone. There are cliques and mean kids and homework and surprise math tests. But after tragedy strikes her family, almost-eleven-year-old Maya has a painful secret that makes many days feel nearly impossible. And today might be Maya's toughest yet. Her family is on edge, she needs to travel alone across the city, a bully is out to get her, and Maya has to face this winter's biggest rainstorm without a coat or an umbrella. But even on the rainiest days, there's hope that the sun will come out soon. Emotional and compassionate, Shelter looks at homelessness through one girl's eyes and explores the power of empathy, friendship, and love. For grades 3-6.
DBC17348 The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is and Isn’t by Steven Conn.
In The Lies of the Land, Steven Conn shows that rural America so often characterized as in crisis or in danger of being left behind has actually been at the center of modern American history, shaped by the same forces as everywhere else in the country: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and suburbanization. Examining each of these forces in turn, Conn invites us to dispense with the lies and half-truths we've believed about rural America and to pursue better solutions to the very real challenges shared all across our nation.
DBC29558 Fancy Nancy: Splendiferous Christmas by Jane O’Connor.
Nancy is devastated, which is even worse than heartbroken, when her fancy Christmas tree topper breaks, threatening to ruin Christmas. For preschool-grade 2.
DBC29570 Ten for Me by Barbara Mariconda.
Join two young children on a mathematical butterfly hunt. The number of butterflies caught each day always adds up to ten. Who will win? Learn how to attract a variety of butterflies through the plants and food they rely on and about their life cycles. For preschool-grade 2.
DBC29571 Pumpkin, Pumpkin by Jeanne Titherington.
Jamie plants a pumpkin seed and after watching it grow, carves it and saves some seeds to plant in the spring.
Upcoming State and Postal Holidays.
Labor Day: Monday, Sept. 2 (Library Closed & Postal Holiday).
Columbus Day: Monday, October 14th (Postal Holiday).
Veterans’ Day: Monday, November 11th (Library Closed & Postal Holiday).
Thanksgiving: Thursday, November 28th (Library Closed & Postal Holiday).
Thanksgiving: Friday, November 29th (Library Closed).
Contact Information for Kansas Talking Books
Address: 1 Kellogg Circle, Box 4055.
Toll-Free phone: 1-800-362-0699
Phone: 620-341-6280
Hours:
Email: KTB@ks.gov
Website: https://library.ks.gov/talking-books
Talking Books Talk Blog: https://library.ks.gov/blogs/talking-books-talk
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kansas.talking.books.service
On X: @KSTalkingBooks