Can anyone recommend audio book player?

[MyKindHiker]

My son has special needs and needs to be educated in a school a long way away (70 min drive each way). He used to have an ipad for the journey but after almost 3 hours a day screen time he was totally fried by the end of the day. Ipads aren’t good for him.

He can’t read or do colouring or anything due to SEN but he does enjoy audio books. I tried putting some on his ipad but he just hacked his way in and played games anyway.

He’s on a shared transport van thing so they can’t play audio books over the speaker because of other kids.

Any ideas if there’s some sort of audio book player he could use without internet access or games? He’s 10 so the yoto looks too young for him (he has learning differences but is very aware of wanting to seem grown up!)

It would need internet access so I could download audio books as at 15 hours a week he’ll get through a lot of books

thanks in advance x

Do you have an old phone lying around? We used to use an old phone as an MP3 player for a young, pre-reading child before the days of Yoto. Took out the SIM card and took off nearly all the apps, just keeping the music player and a little basic paint app (but you could only keep the music/audiobook app). It was ages ago so we used to plug it into the computer to load on ripped CDs, but I think you should be able to do the same now with wifi.

At the time the main alternative was MP3 players. Having the screen made the phone so much more useable for our son - he could navigate by album covers and length of song titles. I think it even helped him learn to read, as he matched up the names of tracks he knew to what he wanted.

obvs if you don't want to download from laptop you would need to have it hooked up to WiFi to load up, but it shouldn't then have internet access outside of the house, and anyway you can remove any apps you don't want him to have like Chrome.

How about a yoto player? They make a travel size one, very robust. You buy cards or you can buy blank cards to make your own (so could make an audible card I think). They also have a radio channel.