Recently, several electronic book readers have become commercially available. These consist of a low glare electronic paper screen and internal memory, which can typically hold the full text of between 150 and 2000 full-length novels. Electronic paper has a wide viewing angle of almost 1808 but a slow refresh speed of about 250 ms. Amazon’s Kindle device has 300 000 books available in electronic format, and 11 000 are available through Waterstones in the UK for the Sony Reader. Table 1 shows the parameters of these and other popular electronic books. Here, we explore the utility of these two electronic books for use by the visually impaired.