by Tom Mitchell
Reprinted with permission from “The UCB Buzz,” February 2021
Some of you who use the Victor Reader may have noticed the Bookmark key on your machine, but perhaps may not have been able to figure out how to use it or why it’s there. This article will give those of you who would like help with the Bookmark key some ideas of what you can do with this very useful key.
Where is the Bookmark key? The Bookmark key is located on the right side of your player, just above the number 3 key. It’s a square key, but it’s turned on an angle so that at first glance, it looks like a triangular button. With this key you can make three different kinds of bookmarks, go through all of the bookmarks you may have in a single book, and delete a bookmark. Now, let’s explore this useful key. Press the key once and it says “Go to bookmark.” Press it again and it says “insert bookmark.” A third press says “Start highlight bookmark.” A fourth press says “bookmark list.” The fifth press says “remove bookmark.” If you press it again, it goes back around to “Go to bookmark.”
“Go to bookmark:” Each bookmark is given a number when you insert a new bookmark. Each book can have a virtually unlimited number of marks. The “Go to bookmark” key allows you to select which bookmark you want to go to. Simply press the “Go to bookmark” key and type the number of the bookmark you want to go to, and press the play button. The machine will begin playing at that point.
“Insert bookmark.” Of course, to go to a bookmark, you must have a bookmark to go to. This is what the “Insert Bookmark” key does. Press the bookmark key until it says “Insert bookmark”, then press either the confirm key, which is the pound key on the number keys, or the play button. The player will say “bookmark 1 inserted,” and continue playing. You may need to use the small left- or right-arrow keys on the bottom of the machine to rewind or fast-forward your player to the exact spot where you want the bookmark to go, but once you find the exact place where you want it, then press the “insert bookmark” key. If you then insert another bookmark somewhere else in the book, bookmark 2 will be inserted. And the machine will add 1 number each time you insert a new bookmark. However, if you want, you can put in your own bookmark number. Just type in a number after you press the “insert bookmark” key and type the number of the bookmark you want, then press play. The machine will insert a bookmark with that number. But if you insert another bookmark after that, the machine will revert back to the next number before your number that you typed. So, for example, you typed in bookmark 10 after bookmark 1 had been inserted, the next number the machine automatically inserts will be 2, not 11. If you wanted 11, you’ll have to type it in. That’s one of the machine’s drawbacks. Most times, I like to just let the machine do the numbering.
“Insert Highlight Bookmark:” This one is an interesting one. Let’s say you have a recipe book from which you want to hear a recipe read, but only that one recipe. This is what the Highlight Bookmark will do. Find the beginning of that recipe. Again, you may need to rewind or fast-forward your machine with the left- and right-arrow buttons on the bottom. But when you have the place located where you’d like to start the highlight bookmark, press the bookmark key until it says “highlight bookmark.” It’s easiest to press play at this point. The machine will say, “Start position,” and will begin playing the book. Let the book play until you reach the end of that recipe. Then press the stop button. Then press the bookmark key again and the machine will say “End Highlight bookmark. Highlight bookmark 2 (if that’s the next number) set.”
“Bookmark List:” This key allows you to go through all of the bookmarks in your book. Say you have a number of items in your book and you’re looking for a specific one, but you don’t remember which bookmark number it is. Simply press the bookmark key until you hear “bookmark list,” then use either keys 6, to go forward through the book, or 4 to go back through the book. After the 6 or 4 key is pressed, the machine will immediately begin playing the section of the book assigned to that bookmark. If it’s not the one you want, simply press 6 or 4 again, and the next or previous bookmark will be played, until you get to the section you want.
The “Remove Bookmark” key allows you to delete any bookmarks you don’t want. If you decide that you have a bookmark you no longer need, press the bookmark key until it says “Remove Bookmark” and type in the number of the bookmark you want to get rid of, then press either the confirm key or the play key. This will not change any of the numbers of the other bookmarks in your book. If you want to delete all of your bookmarks go to the “remove bookmark” key and press the number 9 five times, then confirm. All the bookmarks will be deleted.
That covers the main kinds of bookmarks listed on the bookmark key. But there is another kind of bookmark you can make, called the Voice Bookmark. Let’s say that in a recipe, it recommends an ingredient, but you find you can substitute one that you like better. Say it recommends sugar, but you’d rather use honey. So maybe after it says sugar, you can press the bookmark key until it says “Insert bookmark.” Then, instead of pressing play, press and hold the record button, just as if you were recording a note for the Notebook bookshelf. The machine will say “Start recording,” and give a little beep. Begin speaking and hold the record button until you’ve finished speaking, then release it. The next time you play that portion of the book, you will hear the machine speak whatever you’ve inserted as a voice bookmark. Nothing in the book itself will be erased.
These bookmarks are not stored in the book, but in your own machine. So that if you lend someone your SD card, the bookmarks you make will not go to the other person’s machine. These marks are yours alone and cannot be copied to another person’s Victor Reader.
You can read about bookmarks in the user’s manual that’s already on your Victor Reader. Simply press and hold down key #1 until it says “User’s Manual,” then go through the headings until you hear the section about bookmarks. This will help you find the information you need about bookmarks that’s already there in your Victor Reader.