One thing that changed reading for me was Readwise. One of my favorite products. Super simple concept, I just highlight quotes I like, then I get a daily email of random things I've highlighted. Great way to retain info from non-fiction books, and to retain the feeling of special parts of fiction ones.
My setup is read a few pages while taking a bath, after walking the dog. I listen to the audio book verision (libravox app) while walking the dog. Since I walk the dog every day for an hour. It adds up. Large earmuff / noise cancelling headphones helps with the voice clarity. I also take my m4/3 camera with 14-140mm lens (28-280mm equivalent) with me. So I managed to get quite nice photos/clips of lots of birds/insects on my trail walks. Have a camera sling bag from national geographic (explorer bag) thats small and swings around so I can open it without taking it off. And have the dog on a leash tied to my belt, to keep my hands free. So can even get some runs / interval training in if I want to. So In one hour, I usually get about 2 miles in, walk the dog, listen to audio book and do some bird photography. I also sometimes take a dji neo 2 drone, can even capture beautiful sunsets. Pretty efficient setup. Can recommend.
I recommend readera. It is a non ugly app with can sync to Google drive which prevents you from losing your ebooks when you delete them which can also happen by accident. I can't describe how other apps on Android is so ugly.
Also, if you are just getting started then read easy books. You know the 100 classics from highschool. And you after you finish a book, you can find some great analysis of those books online.
One thing I learned is often when you are excited about those easy books, voracious readers are quick to tell you how much the book sucks. "Read this by an obscure author instead". Ignore that until you have read a whole lot of books in your list.
I’m doing something similar though some of these 100 classics are going to be a bit difficult for those with shorter attention spans, Austen and Dickens come to mind as requiring a high level of attention from me to keep track of all the self referential clauses, also with Homer, for those of us out of school for a long time, Stephen Fry’s four book overview of the underlying myths give a necessary background to fully appreciate Homer. I find for many of the classics I have to reference Wikipedia to understand the historical contexts and some of the archaic practices.
While I like the idea of using small pockets of time for reading a few pages here and there, the practice I find more difficult. I need these few minutes for my brain to stop braining momentarily. I have tried carrying a book with me, but when I did crack it open I typically read a paragraph, reread that paragraph, and then conceded that I don't recall what I just "read".
Likely it's a me problem, but I'm mentally so tired that I simply cannot maintain an uninterrupted stream of tasks even if the interstitial spaces are filled with something I enjoy like reading.
I see a few comments about wasting time with AI. I'm curious what the gist of those conversations is about?
I've found AI to be incredibly useful as a tool to nurture intellectual curiosity.
It even improves my book reading experience. Before, when I didn't fully understand a technical detail the author had glossed over, I usually had to skip it, hoping it wasn't critical for understanding later topics. Now, I can get precise explanations for anything I didn't understand in whatever level or detail I require.
as a consumate obsidian note taker i've found that as asking questions to a quick model and have it challenge me with leading questions has helped me refine my writing to be more useful and driven. when my note is done, i'll pass it through to see if any jargon is a crutch with my prompts are about forcing me to explain it "as simple as possible and no more".
in other situations feed it notes, bookmarked articles, generate syllabuses for something you want to learn more about, and generate create html/css "interactive textbooks". the ability to have an infinitely deep tutor always around feels revolutionary.
well, I created https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw, and as a result of that I have several permanently running agents and entirely too many projects going at once. That's _my_ "messing with AI"...
> This is probably the most difficult part. I had to remove all social media and streaming apps from my iPhone. I removed Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc. When I started, I found myself picking up the phone and immediately noticing that something was missing, since the only things left to do were check the weather, read boring emails, or see my bank account.
These past few months, I have more resolve than ever to cut the chains. Willpower is a practice, and there have been successful steps towards the goal.
First, blocking the real sucks (X, Reddit). Then news (Canadian, won't bore you with the list). And then a innocuous yet stick set of apps that I would bounce to often, for little benefit or reason: weather, server stats, stocks. A new wrinkle? Inane conversations with LLMs. Blocked!
HN still because, well brothers and the rare sister, it's lonely out there and this place cracks me up. And not much longer.
Now on to entire devices. Desktop, laptop, destined for a locked-down iPad. Lobotomized iPhone, got a watch, and now, slowly, more and more reading.
What pushed me over the edge is the realization that I'm in grief. The Internet which once shaped my identity today, in no defensible way, resembles the silly place which once gave me solace. And yet, like a husk I cling to the teet of these manipulative networks and website hoping for one last, satisfying drink.
Why does it matter whether the writing is AI generated or not?
You should always be critical of everything you read. I have stopped reading plenty of books after a few chapters when I realized there was little value in it for me.
Yet a good enough reader can distinguish between appearance and content. Better yet, everyone has their own type of favourite content. Maybe someone out there enjoys a 300 page Claude essay, you never know. Therefore the 'books after 2023?' argument is senseless sans the purchase part in which the contents may not be immediately obvious.
Wow, you are drinking the corporate kool-aid eagerly.
The brain understands concepts. I can say, for example, "a penny saved is a penny earned" and understand that I'm talking about money and savings in general. I've felt the satisfaction of a full bank account and the panic of a near-empty one.
The AI knows that someone once wrote the words "a penny saved is a penny earned" in that order. It has ingested volumes of wise sayings and economic texts to facilitate the statistically accurate words which will follow previous words in the conversation.
You're just describing different ways of learning concepts. Learning from lived experience and learning from reading the experience of the others are both valid.
AI is doing a lot more than just regurgitating facts. It can take abstract concepts and apply them reasonably well in novel scenarios.
To make things more concrete, how about you name a specific concept that you believe a frontier model can't grasp?
If AI was learning and understanding, this would have been solved in 2024. As it is, it's just predicting words that are likely to answer the question.
You're slurping up the excrement of corporations if you think AI is "learning" from reading others' experiences. All it is learning - all it can learn - is what words are likely to appear one after another, with no semantic understanding.
First of all, that's already a solved problem for current frontier models. Give me a specific example if you don't believe me.
Second of all, not being able to properly spell a word doesn't mean one doesn't have a semantic understanding of the concepts the word represent. Do you think an illiterate person is incapable of intelligence?
I already gave a specific example. And since your second paragraph shows that you don't understand what generative AI even is or how it works, you have got some learning due before you continue to discuss AI.
I wouldn't blindly trust a brand new author in 2026, but it's very easy to trust an author that has put out good writing in years past. Not hard to find, there has been plenty of great books written after 2023.
New authors however will certainly have to earn trust for a few years now I think.
It's similar with music, if someone puts out their first album in 2026 and has no singles or EPs, no YouTube presence, etc., it's probably slop. If they have a body of work that goes back a few years, easy to trust.
I don't understand caring about 'slop' in creative media. Its pressingly more important in programming because there are a lot of bugs linters, complicated language models and even fuzzy sandbox searches can't catch. Even if they did, coding is collaborative work and maintaining vibecoded infra is a genuine hassle. However, none of these apply to music or books. AI or not, humane feelings always shapes a piece to its last form and its entirely up to you to determine if you like it or not. AI generally fails to capture this, and if it didn't - a fluke -, why not enjoy the piece?
There's only so much time we have. If I can filter out a category of music (slop) I know from experience I'm 99% likely to not enjoy I'd like to be able to.
I for one can't enjoy a piece of creative media made by AI because I know it only exists so that a handful of losers can profit off the wholesale theft of actual human creativity. Other people don't share these qualms (they are also losers) and that's their choice. Honestly, I could give a fuck if AI tanks coding because I think the internet as we now know it is a mistake of capitalism and if using the plagiarism machine causes codebase maintenance to be harder, aww shucks sucks to suck, guess that's your job now? IDK, I'm married to an artist/writer and was a cook for most of my 20s so I have become a neo-luddite in my middle age when it comes to this specific topic.
Weird how "where you are in the world" affects your view of things, right?
An easy trick nowadays is to simply log out of the accounts. Most social media websites really want you to log in so they become unusable when you log out. Its a good defense in depth strategy.
You’ll have to login each time you’ll want to access it.
If you have a password manager that allows you to login faster, just modify your password in a known way like {password_stored_in_passmanager}_IACKNOWLEDEGEIREALLYWANTTOLOGIN
If you want to keep the account but lose the access for a long time, just remove the password from your password manager, next time you’ll want to login you’ll have to use the password recovery.
For me, as an avid reader of non-fiction books, for learning, i'm starting to question the value of reading them, compared to a good in-depth discussion with an LLM about a subject, together with reading academic papers and long articles/blog posts.
Because using the other methods of learning, possible coupled with having a search environment inside the chat for the future, or creating memorization material for the stuff i specifically want to memorize - seems more efficient and effective.
Two things here. First, you have to know what to ask an LLM. A book on a subject is already organized with all the information that could be returned by the same prompts that would lead to it. The prompting effort was essentially already done by the author and publisher.
Second, you’re getting a more compressed and lossy form of that information from an LLM, unless you go to such efforts that it’s be easier to just read the book. It’s akin to a conversation where a friend asks you about a book in finger and finger detail until you either recite the book for them word for word or direct them to just go read the book.
So, I don’t think LLMs are replacements for reading books. They’re complimentary.
I understand what you mean but there is a depth of thought that is hard to capture outside a book.
The main problem is that so many books are really just essays or papers that get stretched to 300 pages because that is what the publisher wants. A great book I don't think has this problem.
I don't see a separation though between books, LLMs, papers and audiobooks. I would add youtube lectures in there too. They are all valued friends in learning to me.
I loved the article, but the only part that I didn't connect with was the blocking, and probably the goals (not sure if going for the numbers instead of the pleasure of reading something good is ideal long term). I think the author and you shouldn't necessarily be so hard on yourselves to go to these extremes of blocking of these things, usually it works for a while, but it might come back worse when you crack and try it again.
I found myself in a similar situation last year, I felt like I have no time, but I was just scrolling mindlessly on social media whenever there was some off time. As I was reading quite a lot when I was younger, I ended up maybe reading 1-2 books a year, best case scenario. Last summer somehow I wanted to try something else that would help me keep focus or disconnect, maybe for me it worked because of what I started reading. I heard 2-3 years ago on a podcast (Tim Ferris I think) about Ted Chiang and bought one of his collections, but never read it. I got so fascinated with the first book (sort stories, you could just read a story on the go, no huge time investment) and the stories that I ended up reading most all his works, that just hooked me up. A year later, I'm around 2-3 books per month, always try to alternate from fiction to non-fiction, try to mix up and probably the most important part, like in the post, whenever I feel like I don't "vibe" with the book or author, I just stop. Forcing yourself to read a book that you don't like is probably the easiest way of breaking the habit. I even stopped driving to work, the 40 minutes I get per day to read on the train are amazing, it makes me happy if there is some technical issue and the train takes 10-20 minutes longer, more time to read.
> but the only part that I didn't connect with was the blocking, and probably the goals.
Funny, because I found the post terrible but approve of the goals technique if done temporarily. Many many years ago I set myself a reading goal (first year it was number of books; second year and beyond it was time spent reading) and that served me well to both establish the types of books which aren’t worth it and create the reading mindset. Now I read whenever, but it has become frequent and effortless.
Some of the things I found terrible advice in the post include:
> Also, Ryan Holiday — a famous author
Look, you do you, but Ryan Holiday is not a good person to take advice from. Also, being a “famous author” is not a credential for being the person to help you read more, especially if you are familiar with his history.
> Avoid summaries and summary services. (…) reading a summary does not equal reading a book.
Many many books are not worth the amount of pages they take. This includes several books popular on HN. Too many books should have been pamphlets. They take one big core idea then stretch it out over multiple chapters with self-serving examples, story after story of repeating the same bullshit. Not every book is read for pleasure, some are only worth it for the information. Find a talk on YouTube that the author has given, and you’ll get all the important points.
> Avoid even audiobooks. (…)
Look, it’s fine if audiobooks don’t work for you, and it’s fine to let your readers know why. But don’t phrase it as advice of audiobooks not working in general. You may get distracted when listening to an audiobook, you may not be able to concentrate on it, but that is definitely not true for everyone. Listening to an audiobook while cooking or cleaning can work like doodling while listening to a lecture, i.e. it helps retention, attention, and understanding.
What a meaningless gatekeeping distinction. Unless your sole goal is to be a poser who wants to be perceived as a literate intellectual who is oh so cultured and well-read, however you consume the book is up to you. Who the heck is thinking “I really want to read more books, but only if it’s in the way this stranger tells me I should, not the way I enjoy”?
If you like reading paper books, good. If you like reading electronic books, good. If you like listening to audiobooks, good. If you like having your partner lovingly transcribe a book into postcards and mail them to you weekly, good. Consume the book however you want and don’t judge others by their preference.
I dont know you about you, but the reason I read is to learn and retain -- many studies havnt shown audiobooks are much worse than reading for retention.
> I dont know you about you, but the reason I read is to learn and retain
Millions of people read for entertainment. If you ask the people who read Fifty Shades and other erotic novels¹ how many do you think would say they do it “to learn and retain”?
Have you ever listened to a good audiobook for a fictional story? There are fantastic versions of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett’s story where the voice acting really brings them to life in a way many readers cannot with their internal voice (see, for example, aphantasia). Again: Consume books however you like and let others do the same. Why does it concern you how other people enjoy their books?
¹ No judgement. Smut is a big market and you do you as long as you’re not hurting anyone else.
There are many reasons why someone might want to improve their reading, and the only solution to that is to practice reading.
Audiobooks are someone else's (i.e. not your) interpretation of a work. Kind of like how you might go watch a play or a movie instead of reading a script. There's nothing wrong with either of those things, but they're not reading.
I am somewhat biased against audiobooks as well, but how do you justify that consuming text, language, words is substantially different between reading and listening? Particularly in novels and the like? If you aren't re-reading passages, and only processing lines of text in a linear fashion, how is that any different from listening to a transcription?
Yeah I'm trying the same thing, I have an e-reader which is compact enough to have with me. Reddit is entertaining but it's only good for like half an hour a day at best, after which point you start to scrape the bottom of the barrel / niche posts and a lot of repeats. At one point I realised I was reading the same posts three times a day hoping for something new, but that's not how it works.
I very much connect with the "I'm in grief but desperately trying to hold onto something long dead". People point to the smolweb (ugh, that term), Gemini, or something else as proof it's still there, but it really isn't. I'm glad they exist, but the mindshare is with the addictive, algorithm-driven destinations. It's like listening to your favourite band play to a handful of people in the room next to a Taylor Swift concert, you might not like Taylor Swift, but the crowds and energy are all over there, and it's hard to hear your own music when something else is blaring through the wall.
My own response has been to opt out at the hardware level: I've gone for a Mudita Kompakt e-ink phone. I haven't even bothered installing social media, the experience would be bad enough that I'd never be tempted, but what it's great for is KOReader and some light fiction. I use my Kindle for heavier fiction and non-fiction, and paper when I suspect I'll really want to engage with a book, writing all over it, referencing it heavily.
>What pushed me over the edge is the realization that I'm in grief. The Internet which once shaped my identity today, in no defensible way, resembles the silly place which once gave me solace.
ooof. I'm 56. I got an Internet email address before most people knew email existed (1987). I belonged to virtual communities on usenet and listservs well before the web as we know it took root.
You reminded me of the 10 years I spent loading up Achewood every week after it was functionally ended. (Although recently I discovered Onstad has a Patreon, and is regularly drawing new comics again behind the paywall). Most of the internet feels the same way, but there are still pockets of creativity. If you can tolerate a podcast (or a radio play, if you prefer), I really enjoyed listening to the first season of Valley Heat last year. Very silly. A friend linked it to me, and I surprised myself by actually giving it a try; I am glad that I did.
For staying motivated to read, I like to set up and read small clusters of books then write about them. Being able to put a bow on a reading project is easier to stick with than reading X books in a year.
I started a habit to read during my lunch/dinner breaks. I wear headphones, put on some lo-fi beats or jazz, and read a chapter or two until I'm done eating.
I really enjoy it and it's a nice reprieve especially at work.
Got recommendations for specific songs / groups for Lo-Fi beats & jazz? What I've found is that many lo-fi playlists contain songs that have a lot of distracting noises (voices, distorted guitar twang, rain drops, record crackle, etc) - so I've been slowly-but-surely making playlists of study/reading songs.
No recommendations to fix that, I usually just look up some lo-fi playlist on Spotify. I actually listen to lots of video game music (i.e. Diablo 4, Final Fantasy, etc.) as well.
I found reading during meals allowed me to dramatically increase the number of books I got through. It gives about 40 minutes per day, that can sometimes extend to a couple hours if the book is good, schedule allowing.
To me, having these blocks of times sound better than trying to read a sentence or two in the white space around other activities.
This is advice from someone who went from 10 books/year to 52 (1 book/week as described).
I think practical tips for someone already a frequent reader are probably different that for someone who reads 'a bit', a few a year at most. I'd be very happy if I got to 10/year consistently. But that would a) be more than 5.2x-ing; b) be a harder initial curve than the 10 to 52 region, I imagine.
> First of all, you don’t have to make time to read. What you need to do is read every single time you are not doing something else.
(Proceeds to describe how they made time for reading by removing other distractions.)
I'm trying to read more books, but I easily fall into the trap of staying up late reading good books, and I have trouble recovering from sleep deficit these days.
Audiobooks and tracking. I still watch a lot of YouTube and other social media so I haven't had to cut anything out yet I have many audiobooks on my phone loaded up that I listen to at 2x+ speed as well as have a spreadsheet of what I'm reading and how long it takes. Before anyone comments, yes I can understand it just fine as I've acclimated myself over years to do so, it's similar to blind people being able to understand at very high speeds too after years of practice.
> First of all, you don’t have to make time to read. What you need to do is read every single time you are not doing something else.
Mmh I’m not sure about that. I prefer to read for 1-2 hours rather than read 2 minutes here and 5 minutes there, especially for books that require some concentration to read, like dense stories and/or books not in my native language.
Who asked what you prefer? That has nothing to do with reading more books. Personally I have pages from books projected onto the walls, so that if I ever accidentally look up from the book that I'm reading, I read part of another book. Also I hire a mercenary soldier to watch me at all times, and if I try to stop reading even for a moment he jumps at me with a combat knife and pushes an open book into my face.
In this way I read more books, which is necessary because ... ah, I almost started discussing why to read more books, that's a different question.
This "serious reader" expression makes my skin crawl.
Like if it was something of a sport with olympics where people compete in their own weight and it is measured in the end to the hundredths of seconds in front of spectators in a stadion shaped library who cheer READ, READ, READ! Quality is mentioned, remotely, through selection, but still, the mental picture remains like that. And the post smells like a training guide from a large gym for readers. It's name is 'Serious Readers!'
I don't think serious reader is a cringe term. Reading is a skill like any other and we use terms like "serious golfer" or "serious painter". The flip side of serious is causal. It's okay to structure your life so that reading is a big part of it.
I've noticed there is extremely common, profound insecurity among a substantial portion of online commenters around the concept of reading. People will come out of the woodwork whenever anyone claims to read more deeply than YAF or Sci-Fi and declaim them as pretentious / a loser / cringe. Some people just like reading frequently or reading hard books, and that's okay!
Neither the author, you or me have to wait for someone to ask us; we just share our thoughts with strangers in the hope to bring something positive into the conversation.
Yes. In my experience, I need to at least read a book for 1-2 hours to really enter the story, and then I can read for 10 minutes here and there. The issue is if I start reading the book 10 minutes by 10 minutes I never really enter the story and it takes me more time to finish it.
I have an almost-four year old child and not a lot of downtime. I used to listen to podcasts when I was doing dishes, cleaning the house, walking the dog, etc. I've mostly abandoned podcasts, in favor of audiobooks. It didn't feel like they were benefiting me in any meaningful way—almost like they were just empty calories for my ears.
I finally made it all the way through The Power Broker recently, which I've wanted to read for years, and am now on Jennifer Pahlka's really insightful Recoding America, which features heavily in the chapter "Govern" in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance.
Audiobooks are definitely slower to get through than just reading, but I find that I can stick with them in a way that books just haven't allowed me to do in years.
I got a Libro.fm sub when my son was born last year and am finding the same.
I actually think this is about quality. Podcasts that take real effort (Hardcore History, Fall of Civilizations, Gastropod) are absolutely worth my time, but they're basically mini-audiobooks in their own right.
I would audiobook 24/7 with the open ear headphones (Shokz etc) but I don't think I could afford to pay for that much that was worth listening too / low maintenance.
As others have pointed out, libraries often have Libby access which can have pretty huge selections of audiobooks. There's a discovery feature that lets you search by vibe, which I am finding useful.
There is also another benefit to books, on average they are much better than a random 3 hour podcast.
If you care about what you read, you'd be getting something that the author has spend a lot of time, skill and energy to write, the editor would have spend a lot of time and skill to improve with the author.
I have a measure for all content I consume, quality/hr of reading/listening. If it's just a long video that has 2-3 questions that has caught my attention I'd be listening only those. If it's a long text that I might find something interesting I'll ask the LLM to summarize the main ideas as a filter before I decide to dive in.
Books, and their audiobooks version have on average much more bang per hour than random podcasts, because they're structured, authors had spend more time on them and you can cherry pick from a structure.
I also have caught myself using sloppy content as excuse not working on planned tasks with excuses like "this might be useful", or watching "productivity porn" videos. I think LLMs are good as a pre-filter for that.
Audiobooks are just a different medium. I don't think people should pretend that an audiobook is a book. You process the two in completely different ways. This doesn't imply one is better than the other either.
For me I don't like audiobooks because its very slow and spoken stories should have a different cadence, velocity, set of dynamics, and diction than a book should (check out "the moth" to see what I'm talking about). I hold nothing against people who don't like to read or people who like audiobooks, or people who like slow things - Suum cuique.
Audiobooks are heavily dependent on the reader. In one case, I had an audiobook where the translator was the reader. She is an excellent translator but a poor reader.
Many authors are poor readers of their own work.
They are certainly good while you are on a long drive etc, because they entertain you while doing some another task which you wouldn't be able to do while reading. During lockdown, I could not read due to the constant stress and fear mongering, but I had to walk a lot every day and the audiobooks were a good way to accompany that.
The best audiobook I’ve ever listened to is Stephen Kings On Writing: A memoir of the Craft, read by the author. One of our times best storytellers, both when it comes to writing them and telling them.
I've a soft spot for that book because it saved me from two days of very long and dreary jury service. (They kept us sitting around all that time.) I think I read at least a third of it in there. The only court stuff I heard was for about ten minutes and incredibly unexciting.
When I write a character, I picture not just the character but the voice, same with reading, and going from a paper or eBook to an audio book usually breaks both. Books I write rarely include characters from Manchester (UK), so reading voices with my strong accent would definitely break a lot of my books. It is also the reason I sometimes don't enjoy movies if I have read the book. It is not a one way street though, some really good narrators can improve the experience a lot, same with good directors.
I've been building a little app on the side that allows me to primarily read my books in epub, mobi or pdf -> text format but generate readouts on demand for only the bits I want (highlight, paragraph, page, chapter) so that I can continue while I'm on the go, without having to bifurcate between apps - this might already exist but I made mine
Naturally, I also added the ability to highlight, leave notes and ... ask questions (via API)
Even with incredible models, it's a decent amount of work to get this to work nicely
I agree that it’s a pretty different experience for fiction, where the subjective experience is everything and the narrator can color your experience a lot.
For nonfiction, I think the two mediums are virtually the same depending on the density of the book. Most differences come down to the fact that you’re more susceptible to distraction. Most nonfiction books are light and repetitive enough that I don’t think it’s a big deal
In a limited fashion, yes. But ebooks mean you can search highlights, categorize them, see summaries of them, etc if using calibre, zotero, or similar.
I used to have a 45 minute driving commute each way to and from work. I listened to many non-fiction audio books (on cassette!)during that time and would often listen to them over and over many times. 20 years later I can still quote long portions of those books from memory. I can't do that with any print books. Definitely easier for me to listen to an audio book several times in a row than a print book.
>I don't think people should pretend that an audiobook is a book. You process the two in completely different ways.
Is this attitude a holdover from encouraging small children to read for themselves? I don't know if this is quite the right framing but are you... hearing-illterate to some degree?
Some voice actors definitely add a layer of interpretation, and some are distractingly bad, but otherwise it could not be any more of an equal experience absorbing a book through my eyes or my ears. Unless there was a need to physically interact with the book, quickly flipping between sections or keeping notes in the margin, which I rarely do.
"I didn't really get the full experience until I read it on the page instead of listening" is an absurd statement to me, but maybe people's brains work differently.
There are things missing from text that can be conveyed over audio or with body language in person certainly so those experiences can't be directly translated from real life to the page.
It's not a maybe. People's brains work differently.
For one thing, in the written version, it's way easier to scan backwards precisely to a point in the text to clarify missed details.
Sometimes I like to stop reading for a moment and take in the scenery. With an audiobook, the narrator has already decided to blurt out the next line. Or I'd have to quickly pause it and lose my train of thought. With reading I'm fully in control of when the next bit of information will be introduced.
Audiobooks are great for dialog-heavy stories, but sometimes I want to spend a little bit longer on a particular page when the author is building imagery... what's the equivalent of that in an audiobook, slowing the speech down? Except it's not about speed, it's about soaking in the particular meaning of a word (or string of words) before going onto the next.
I don't think this even scratches the surface of how different they are as mediums of storytelling.
Yes, this is where the disagreement between the two camps arises. Some people view reading holistically while others are only concerned with the end result. If only the end result matters, it doesn't matter much how you got there.
This isn't a perfect comparison (since I believe there may be some underlying mechanical difference), but it's like how it's possible to get your nutritional needs met with liquid nutrition or eating whole foods. They have the same end result nutritionally, but some people find liquid nutrition to be horrible.
I think it's especially the case for harder-to-read books that I prefer the textual version. Some books are highly referential. They may take place in a country I'm not familiar with. Take The Stranger by Camus. I have never been to Algiers (or Algeria for that matter), so I want to get a feel for the beach in Algiers. Sometimes the author will refer to a flower I've never heard of, so I will look it up. Stuff like this is important to me for experiencing the story, but for others, it's not important. They use context clues to determine "it's a flower" and just fill in whatever flower they feel like putting there.
I love books and audiobooks and I experience absolutely no difference between the two but that is contingent on liking the voice actor's voice.
This year I have really moved to listening to all books read by the synthetic af_heart model. I love that voice so much. #1 Robertson Dean, #2 af_heart.
> it could not be any more of an equal experience absorbing a book through my eyes or my ears.
With stories, probably. With nonstories, and depending on what kind of nonstory book, I might jump around a lot. I might like to skim quickly, then skim more thoroughly, then read thoroughly on some sections and less others. You just can't do that with audiobooks.
Depending on how thought-provoking something is, my mind may stray on thinking of implications. Then it's easier for my eyes to dart back by the time I notice and reread x or y, than rewinding, listening a little bit, rewind some more, etc.
I often pause and reflect. Or replay a couple pages or start over with a chapter. Not totally alien to what you’re describing, but most people aren’t so hands on with audio controls, sure. Though you can choose to be with the right tools for it.
A good non fiction book should take a year to "read" though. Because you'll need to stop, reread, scribble, look up online for other help. It should be a challenge!
I also don’t think people realize how often they zone out while listening to audiobooks and miss important details. You can zone out while reading books too but with audiobooks there usually another stimulus by design.
The fact that people say "I've read 30 books last year" when they heard the book is absurd to me. It is a completely (and honestly quite interesting) medium. I've heard and then read a few books and the experiences are completely different. Also, one of mine biggest things for reading is to completely focus on the text, and the audio book is almost the antithesis of this, because most people like them so they can do chores/driving _and_ listen. Two completely different ways of experiencing the text.
When I read I build internal voices of the characters or narrators through the pages as a part of my imagination engaging with the words of the book. With audiobooks this never happens.
Agreed, there's no one medium fits all in all stages of their life and a lot of the takes rooted in such a perspective can lead people to seek convenience (scrolling) instead of engaging.
Reading does force you to slow down to let more enter your brain.
Audiobooks can do the same in a different way.
Either way, longer form content helps the brain unpack and retain bigger/longer picture things which is the kind of focus that many want to improve.
After a long reading hiatus, audiobooks helped me pick up speed. I read faster with audiobook than without. For a few books, I combined regular and audiobook, so the audiobook forces me to keep reading, and hearing what I'm reading gives me something to hold on to, and helps a bit to prevent my thoughts from distracting me. But I don't have an audiobook for all the books I want to read.
For me audiobooks are okay for non fiction but for fiction I need to read it to be able to immerse in the story and imagine the characters.
Also no all non fiction it's okay either, for philosophy that's a little complicated I need to read it too.
Fiction read by a skilled actor (voice or performance) can be a real insight. My reading voice is quite distinct from what such an actor can bring to a work.
Not all narrators are actors, and depending on the narration you may or may not gain from this.
For a good set of examples, I'd recommend Selected Shorts (Symphony Space), which is a set of podcasts and broadcasts voiced by stage and screen actors. They're usually at least good, and often excellent.
> Avoid even audiobooks. Big corporations want to grab your attention by trying to market audiobooks as books for busy people, but don’t fall for the trap. A book is just boring black text on a white page because that’s how it’s meant to be consumed, and it requires your entire attention. Listening to audio while cooking or cleaning or whatever you do is not the same thing; you are not 100% concentrated on the content. Also, reading is faster than listening, so use your time wisely.
Wow, listening to the Power Broker now, about 1/3 of the way through.
Audiobooks completely changed things for me... in the past 2 years, 'read' about 40 books, almost entirely listened to on my daily runs. The prior 2 years? I think I read 3.
Same. Though for me I just can’t and don’t want to sit for hours. I still read 15-30min to go to bed, but with an audiobook I can listen for hours to amazing content while doing everything else I want to do in life like exercise and cook.
Now it’s at the point where I can’t wait to go for a run or do the dishes because it means I’ll get farther in a great book. Finally a real life hack.
I used to do that when my children were little. However, in another 3 years your child will not require you as much anymore and your downtime duration will improve.
My problem has been that once I started doing the audiobooks/podcasts, it has been really hard to reclaim my focus to read. I used to be able to power through books. Now, there always seems to be a distraction at hand.
I cannot ever manage audiobooks, because I tend to wander while I'm reading, thinking about what I just read, processing it, mulling it over, or exploring it in some other way. With a book,
I just go back to where I stopped reading when ready and carry on. But with an audiobook, it keeps going while I'm thinking and not listening, and I miss it and have to rewind an unknown amount, over and over.
I'll echo this too. I've liddles in the house and books are a no go right now. If they even let me the minutes to read, that would be great. But I know from repeated experience that books are too fragile for them to have around, let alone the stains and stickiness that young children affect on every surface.
Audiobooks have been a god send and then the Libby app manna from upon high. Free, high quality, adult-level infotainment?! I'll never go back.
One thing if do is up the reading speed. It takes time but I'm comfortable at 2.6x these days, even on the fragmented sleep a teething toddler grants you. For really in depth stuff I'll slow it down a lot, but a Stephen King dime store novel or John Grisham thriller? Oh yeah, speed it up no worries
"Avoid even audiobooks. Big corporations want to grab your attention by trying to market audiobooks as books for busy people, but don’t fall for the trap. A book is just boring black text on a white page because that’s how it’s meant to be consumed, and it requires your entire attention. Listening to audio while cooking or cleaning or whatever you do is not the same thing; you are not 100% concentrated on the content. "
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I disagree with the author of this post. Audiobooks are fantastic in certain settings. e.g. Driving, or any form of transit if you're prone to motion sickness. Yes, listening is different from reading, but you're still getting information into your brain. There are definitely books that don't work as audiobooks (e.g. Anything with equations), but there are also books that are, perhaps, best consumed as audiobooks. Homer was passed down orally for generations before being written down. Anyone who poopoo's an audiobook of Homer deserves to be ridiculed.
Loved this blog, the simplicity with which they explained. I have been meaning to get back to reading but have not been able to. Having read this, I feel motivated enough to get back into the game and start reading a book from tomorrow. Thanks, Elia!
You want to read more? Miss phone calls, meals, breaking news; forego an hour or two of rest; work on your core; replace all clocks indoors with sundials. Print. Scan. Pirate. Dig the crates. Sail the seas. It's not a technological problem. It's not a device problem. It's you. You don't want it enough. You don't want to read.
Maybe you should take up cycling. Maybe you need to write more. Maybe you aren't eating enough fruit. Maybe you need a little caffeine. Maybe it's the air quality. We don't think it's microplastics.
Your friends who read. Maybe it's their fault. They're not printing enough. Or sending enough screenshots. Why haven't you caught them outside on street medians reading out loud? To whoever. They're not setting for you the right example.
Audio books won't cut it. Hey big guy why don't stick one a them foam feet thingies in between ya toes while ya at it huh! And cut some cucumbers to recess the bags under ya eyes so people wont mistake ya for a guy who actually reads his books and will not following the family to their trip to Monaco this summer, no, sorry Donna, I'll be here at home with the books. The dog will have to learn to fend on its own as will the plants, your niece and nephew.
This past year I've been reading more again, and in the past four or five months I've had the goal of reading every day. No fixed number of page or chapters, just read. It's also incredibly depended on the book if you can read 100 pages or just 10. But you're right, it becomes easier and it over time becomes your default entertainment, presumably because you brain sees it as the easy choice.
One thing that have made it easier for be though has been the decline of everything else. As someone pointed out, the internet isn't the internet we grew up with, TV shows mostly suck now and are all designed for binge watching which leaves me feeling physically ill. Same with e.g. YouTube, there are still creators who's content I enjoy, but the YouTube algorithm seems to force me out of a tangent and preferably into Shorts. Much of this algorithmicly pushed content makes me feel ill, so I try to steer clear of it.
So now I buy used books, most happens to be published in the 1970s for some reason. There are so many out there that I'll never run out of things to read and at €1-2 per books, it's cheap.
I’ve been leaning into audiobooks for the past two years and it’s completely revitalized my intellectual life. I feel alive in ways I’d forgotten. And it extends beyond audiobooks too. I started carrying a paperback around with me, reading philosophy and history again. I even got a subscription to the NY Review of Books! Someone I know got me into neo-pragmatism and I fell in love with Richard Rorty. There’s something qualitatively different about sticking with a person who goes really deep into a topic, and benefitting from their years of reflection and research.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 81.5 ms ] threadWhich is understandable.
One thing I learned is often when you are excited about those easy books, voracious readers are quick to tell you how much the book sucks. "Read this by an obscure author instead". Ignore that until you have read a whole lot of books in your list.
Likely it's a me problem, but I'm mentally so tired that I simply cannot maintain an uninterrupted stream of tasks even if the interstitial spaces are filled with something I enjoy like reading.
1. Stop messing about with AI
2. Stop doomscrolling/interacting on social networks (HN is within my 15m allocation)
3. Stop watching _any_ Youtube video that doesn't teach me anything
4. Gloss over my 200 RSS feeds, don't be a completionist
5. Put on classical music, not indie or radio
It almost works. Almost.
I see a few comments about wasting time with AI. I'm curious what the gist of those conversations is about?
I've found AI to be incredibly useful as a tool to nurture intellectual curiosity.
It even improves my book reading experience. Before, when I didn't fully understand a technical detail the author had glossed over, I usually had to skip it, hoping it wasn't critical for understanding later topics. Now, I can get precise explanations for anything I didn't understand in whatever level or detail I require.
in other situations feed it notes, bookmarked articles, generate syllabuses for something you want to learn more about, and generate create html/css "interactive textbooks". the ability to have an infinitely deep tutor always around feels revolutionary.
> This is probably the most difficult part. I had to remove all social media and streaming apps from my iPhone. I removed Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc. When I started, I found myself picking up the phone and immediately noticing that something was missing, since the only things left to do were check the weather, read boring emails, or see my bank account.
These past few months, I have more resolve than ever to cut the chains. Willpower is a practice, and there have been successful steps towards the goal.
First, blocking the real sucks (X, Reddit). Then news (Canadian, won't bore you with the list). And then a innocuous yet stick set of apps that I would bounce to often, for little benefit or reason: weather, server stats, stocks. A new wrinkle? Inane conversations with LLMs. Blocked!
HN still because, well brothers and the rare sister, it's lonely out there and this place cracks me up. And not much longer.
Now on to entire devices. Desktop, laptop, destined for a locked-down iPad. Lobotomized iPhone, got a watch, and now, slowly, more and more reading.
What pushed me over the edge is the realization that I'm in grief. The Internet which once shaped my identity today, in no defensible way, resembles the silly place which once gave me solace. And yet, like a husk I cling to the teet of these manipulative networks and website hoping for one last, satisfying drink.
It ain't comin'. Books, then. Like my mother.
You should always be critical of everything you read. I have stopped reading plenty of books after a few chapters when I realized there was little value in it for me.
Token prediction machines do not produce meaningful output.
It is much more likely that they will regurgitate, without attribution, something meaningful that a human wrote (in their plagiarism/training data).
Meaningful "output" is only meaningful if the author understood the meaning, instead of predicting words in sequence.
Just because a brain is made from organic material rather than silicon, doesn't make it less of a prediction machine.
The brain understands concepts. I can say, for example, "a penny saved is a penny earned" and understand that I'm talking about money and savings in general. I've felt the satisfaction of a full bank account and the panic of a near-empty one.
The AI knows that someone once wrote the words "a penny saved is a penny earned" in that order. It has ingested volumes of wise sayings and economic texts to facilitate the statistically accurate words which will follow previous words in the conversation.
AI is doing a lot more than just regurgitating facts. It can take abstract concepts and apply them reasonably well in novel scenarios.
To make things more concrete, how about you name a specific concept that you believe a frontier model can't grasp?
If AI was learning and understanding, this would have been solved in 2024. As it is, it's just predicting words that are likely to answer the question.
You're slurping up the excrement of corporations if you think AI is "learning" from reading others' experiences. All it is learning - all it can learn - is what words are likely to appear one after another, with no semantic understanding.
Second of all, not being able to properly spell a word doesn't mean one doesn't have a semantic understanding of the concepts the word represent. Do you think an illiterate person is incapable of intelligence?
New authors however will certainly have to earn trust for a few years now I think.
It's similar with music, if someone puts out their first album in 2026 and has no singles or EPs, no YouTube presence, etc., it's probably slop. If they have a body of work that goes back a few years, easy to trust.
I for one can't enjoy a piece of creative media made by AI because I know it only exists so that a handful of losers can profit off the wholesale theft of actual human creativity. Other people don't share these qualms (they are also losers) and that's their choice. Honestly, I could give a fuck if AI tanks coding because I think the internet as we now know it is a mistake of capitalism and if using the plagiarism machine causes codebase maintenance to be harder, aww shucks sucks to suck, guess that's your job now? IDK, I'm married to an artist/writer and was a cook for most of my 20s so I have become a neo-luddite in my middle age when it comes to this specific topic.
Weird how "where you are in the world" affects your view of things, right?
You’ll have to login each time you’ll want to access it.
If you have a password manager that allows you to login faster, just modify your password in a known way like {password_stored_in_passmanager}_IACKNOWLEDEGEIREALLYWANTTOLOGIN
If you want to keep the account but lose the access for a long time, just remove the password from your password manager, next time you’ll want to login you’ll have to use the password recovery.
It's _really_ hard to break the phone habit. I was in a good place for a few years but have recently been spending time on Reddit.
It's not the end of the world. Ultimately I think going back to Reddit is because I recently haven't had the patience to really read, reflect, etc.
[0]: https://sjer.red/blog/2023/screen-time/
Second, you’re getting a more compressed and lossy form of that information from an LLM, unless you go to such efforts that it’s be easier to just read the book. It’s akin to a conversation where a friend asks you about a book in finger and finger detail until you either recite the book for them word for word or direct them to just go read the book.
So, I don’t think LLMs are replacements for reading books. They’re complimentary.
The main problem is that so many books are really just essays or papers that get stretched to 300 pages because that is what the publisher wants. A great book I don't think has this problem.
I don't see a separation though between books, LLMs, papers and audiobooks. I would add youtube lectures in there too. They are all valued friends in learning to me.
I found myself in a similar situation last year, I felt like I have no time, but I was just scrolling mindlessly on social media whenever there was some off time. As I was reading quite a lot when I was younger, I ended up maybe reading 1-2 books a year, best case scenario. Last summer somehow I wanted to try something else that would help me keep focus or disconnect, maybe for me it worked because of what I started reading. I heard 2-3 years ago on a podcast (Tim Ferris I think) about Ted Chiang and bought one of his collections, but never read it. I got so fascinated with the first book (sort stories, you could just read a story on the go, no huge time investment) and the stories that I ended up reading most all his works, that just hooked me up. A year later, I'm around 2-3 books per month, always try to alternate from fiction to non-fiction, try to mix up and probably the most important part, like in the post, whenever I feel like I don't "vibe" with the book or author, I just stop. Forcing yourself to read a book that you don't like is probably the easiest way of breaking the habit. I even stopped driving to work, the 40 minutes I get per day to read on the train are amazing, it makes me happy if there is some technical issue and the train takes 10-20 minutes longer, more time to read.
Funny, because I found the post terrible but approve of the goals technique if done temporarily. Many many years ago I set myself a reading goal (first year it was number of books; second year and beyond it was time spent reading) and that served me well to both establish the types of books which aren’t worth it and create the reading mindset. Now I read whenever, but it has become frequent and effortless.
Some of the things I found terrible advice in the post include:
> Also, Ryan Holiday — a famous author
Look, you do you, but Ryan Holiday is not a good person to take advice from. Also, being a “famous author” is not a credential for being the person to help you read more, especially if you are familiar with his history.
> Avoid summaries and summary services. (…) reading a summary does not equal reading a book.
Many many books are not worth the amount of pages they take. This includes several books popular on HN. Too many books should have been pamphlets. They take one big core idea then stretch it out over multiple chapters with self-serving examples, story after story of repeating the same bullshit. Not every book is read for pleasure, some are only worth it for the information. Find a talk on YouTube that the author has given, and you’ll get all the important points.
> Avoid even audiobooks. (…)
Look, it’s fine if audiobooks don’t work for you, and it’s fine to let your readers know why. But don’t phrase it as advice of audiobooks not working in general. You may get distracted when listening to an audiobook, you may not be able to concentrate on it, but that is definitely not true for everyone. Listening to an audiobook while cooking or cleaning can work like doodling while listening to a lecture, i.e. it helps retention, attention, and understanding.
Listening to an audiobook is not the same as reading a book.
The whole point of the article was how to read more books, not how to have someone read books to you.
If you like reading paper books, good. If you like reading electronic books, good. If you like listening to audiobooks, good. If you like having your partner lovingly transcribe a book into postcards and mail them to you weekly, good. Consume the book however you want and don’t judge others by their preference.
Example: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247504935_They_Hear...
Millions of people read for entertainment. If you ask the people who read Fifty Shades and other erotic novels¹ how many do you think would say they do it “to learn and retain”?
Have you ever listened to a good audiobook for a fictional story? There are fantastic versions of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett’s story where the voice acting really brings them to life in a way many readers cannot with their internal voice (see, for example, aphantasia). Again: Consume books however you like and let others do the same. Why does it concern you how other people enjoy their books?
¹ No judgement. Smut is a big market and you do you as long as you’re not hurting anyone else.
Audiobooks are someone else's (i.e. not your) interpretation of a work. Kind of like how you might go watch a play or a movie instead of reading a script. There's nothing wrong with either of those things, but they're not reading.
Why does that distinction matter?
As does Goodreads and reviewing, for myself, every book I read.
Logging out of social media on phones is a good idea.
Reading it is.
My own response has been to opt out at the hardware level: I've gone for a Mudita Kompakt e-ink phone. I haven't even bothered installing social media, the experience would be bad enough that I'd never be tempted, but what it's great for is KOReader and some light fiction. I use my Kindle for heavier fiction and non-fiction, and paper when I suspect I'll really want to engage with a book, writing all over it, referencing it heavily.
ooof. I'm 56. I got an Internet email address before most people knew email existed (1987). I belonged to virtual communities on usenet and listservs well before the web as we know it took root.
Consequently, I feel your comment in my bones.
I really enjoy it and it's a nice reprieve especially at work.
Thanks!
To me, having these blocks of times sound better than trying to read a sentence or two in the white space around other activities.
I think practical tips for someone already a frequent reader are probably different that for someone who reads 'a bit', a few a year at most. I'd be very happy if I got to 10/year consistently. But that would a) be more than 5.2x-ing; b) be a harder initial curve than the 10 to 52 region, I imagine.
(Proceeds to describe how they made time for reading by removing other distractions.)
I'm trying to read more books, but I easily fall into the trap of staying up late reading good books, and I have trouble recovering from sleep deficit these days.
Mmh I’m not sure about that. I prefer to read for 1-2 hours rather than read 2 minutes here and 5 minutes there, especially for books that require some concentration to read, like dense stories and/or books not in my native language.
In this way I read more books, which is necessary because ... ah, I almost started discussing why to read more books, that's a different question.
Like if it was something of a sport with olympics where people compete in their own weight and it is measured in the end to the hundredths of seconds in front of spectators in a stadion shaped library who cheer READ, READ, READ! Quality is mentioned, remotely, through selection, but still, the mental picture remains like that. And the post smells like a training guide from a large gym for readers. It's name is 'Serious Readers!'
I finally made it all the way through The Power Broker recently, which I've wanted to read for years, and am now on Jennifer Pahlka's really insightful Recoding America, which features heavily in the chapter "Govern" in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance.
Audiobooks are definitely slower to get through than just reading, but I find that I can stick with them in a way that books just haven't allowed me to do in years.
Your point is well taken and very reasonable though.
I actually think this is about quality. Podcasts that take real effort (Hardcore History, Fall of Civilizations, Gastropod) are absolutely worth my time, but they're basically mini-audiobooks in their own right.
As others have pointed out, libraries often have Libby access which can have pretty huge selections of audiobooks. There's a discovery feature that lets you search by vibe, which I am finding useful.
I have a measure for all content I consume, quality/hr of reading/listening. If it's just a long video that has 2-3 questions that has caught my attention I'd be listening only those. If it's a long text that I might find something interesting I'll ask the LLM to summarize the main ideas as a filter before I decide to dive in.
Books, and their audiobooks version have on average much more bang per hour than random podcasts, because they're structured, authors had spend more time on them and you can cherry pick from a structure.
I also have caught myself using sloppy content as excuse not working on planned tasks with excuses like "this might be useful", or watching "productivity porn" videos. I think LLMs are good as a pre-filter for that.
For me I don't like audiobooks because its very slow and spoken stories should have a different cadence, velocity, set of dynamics, and diction than a book should (check out "the moth" to see what I'm talking about). I hold nothing against people who don't like to read or people who like audiobooks, or people who like slow things - Suum cuique.
Many authors are poor readers of their own work.
They are certainly good while you are on a long drive etc, because they entertain you while doing some another task which you wouldn't be able to do while reading. During lockdown, I could not read due to the constant stress and fear mongering, but I had to walk a lot every day and the audiobooks were a good way to accompany that.
The best audiobook I’ve ever listened to is Stephen Kings On Writing: A memoir of the Craft, read by the author. One of our times best storytellers, both when it comes to writing them and telling them.
Naturally, I also added the ability to highlight, leave notes and ... ask questions (via API)
Even with incredible models, it's a decent amount of work to get this to work nicely
For nonfiction, I think the two mediums are virtually the same depending on the density of the book. Most differences come down to the fact that you’re more susceptible to distraction. Most nonfiction books are light and repetitive enough that I don’t think it’s a big deal
Is this attitude a holdover from encouraging small children to read for themselves? I don't know if this is quite the right framing but are you... hearing-illterate to some degree?
Some voice actors definitely add a layer of interpretation, and some are distractingly bad, but otherwise it could not be any more of an equal experience absorbing a book through my eyes or my ears. Unless there was a need to physically interact with the book, quickly flipping between sections or keeping notes in the margin, which I rarely do.
"I didn't really get the full experience until I read it on the page instead of listening" is an absurd statement to me, but maybe people's brains work differently.
There are things missing from text that can be conveyed over audio or with body language in person certainly so those experiences can't be directly translated from real life to the page.
For one thing, in the written version, it's way easier to scan backwards precisely to a point in the text to clarify missed details.
Sometimes I like to stop reading for a moment and take in the scenery. With an audiobook, the narrator has already decided to blurt out the next line. Or I'd have to quickly pause it and lose my train of thought. With reading I'm fully in control of when the next bit of information will be introduced.
Audiobooks are great for dialog-heavy stories, but sometimes I want to spend a little bit longer on a particular page when the author is building imagery... what's the equivalent of that in an audiobook, slowing the speech down? Except it's not about speed, it's about soaking in the particular meaning of a word (or string of words) before going onto the next.
I don't think this even scratches the surface of how different they are as mediums of storytelling.
This isn't a perfect comparison (since I believe there may be some underlying mechanical difference), but it's like how it's possible to get your nutritional needs met with liquid nutrition or eating whole foods. They have the same end result nutritionally, but some people find liquid nutrition to be horrible.
I think it's especially the case for harder-to-read books that I prefer the textual version. Some books are highly referential. They may take place in a country I'm not familiar with. Take The Stranger by Camus. I have never been to Algiers (or Algeria for that matter), so I want to get a feel for the beach in Algiers. Sometimes the author will refer to a flower I've never heard of, so I will look it up. Stuff like this is important to me for experiencing the story, but for others, it's not important. They use context clues to determine "it's a flower" and just fill in whatever flower they feel like putting there.
I love books and audiobooks and I experience absolutely no difference between the two but that is contingent on liking the voice actor's voice.
This year I have really moved to listening to all books read by the synthetic af_heart model. I love that voice so much. #1 Robertson Dean, #2 af_heart.
With stories, probably. With nonstories, and depending on what kind of nonstory book, I might jump around a lot. I might like to skim quickly, then skim more thoroughly, then read thoroughly on some sections and less others. You just can't do that with audiobooks.
Depending on how thought-provoking something is, my mind may stray on thinking of implications. Then it's easier for my eyes to dart back by the time I notice and reread x or y, than rewinding, listening a little bit, rewind some more, etc.
When I read I build internal voices of the characters or narrators through the pages as a part of my imagination engaging with the words of the book. With audiobooks this never happens.
Reading does force you to slow down to let more enter your brain.
Audiobooks can do the same in a different way.
Either way, longer form content helps the brain unpack and retain bigger/longer picture things which is the kind of focus that many want to improve.
Reading also helps one be more articulate.
Articulation is a helpful skill in using AI.
Not all narrators are actors, and depending on the narration you may or may not gain from this.
For a good set of examples, I'd recommend Selected Shorts (Symphony Space), which is a set of podcasts and broadcasts voiced by stage and screen actors. They're usually at least good, and often excellent.
<https://symphonyspace.org/selected-shorts>
Recent episodes: <https://www.symphonyspace.org/selected-shorts/episodes>
Two personal all-time faves:
- "The Appropriation of Cultures", by Percival Everett, read by Ruben Santiago Hudson.
- "The Smoker", by David Schickler, read by Robert Sean Leonard: <https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=5XbSI5swx1E>.
Audiobooks completely changed things for me... in the past 2 years, 'read' about 40 books, almost entirely listened to on my daily runs. The prior 2 years? I think I read 3.
Now it’s at the point where I can’t wait to go for a run or do the dishes because it means I’ll get farther in a great book. Finally a real life hack.
My problem has been that once I started doing the audiobooks/podcasts, it has been really hard to reclaim my focus to read. I used to be able to power through books. Now, there always seems to be a distraction at hand.
Audiobooks have been a god send and then the Libby app manna from upon high. Free, high quality, adult-level infotainment?! I'll never go back.
One thing if do is up the reading speed. It takes time but I'm comfortable at 2.6x these days, even on the fragmented sleep a teething toddler grants you. For really in depth stuff I'll slow it down a lot, but a Stephen King dime store novel or John Grisham thriller? Oh yeah, speed it up no worries
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I disagree with the author of this post. Audiobooks are fantastic in certain settings. e.g. Driving, or any form of transit if you're prone to motion sickness. Yes, listening is different from reading, but you're still getting information into your brain. There are definitely books that don't work as audiobooks (e.g. Anything with equations), but there are also books that are, perhaps, best consumed as audiobooks. Homer was passed down orally for generations before being written down. Anyone who poopoo's an audiobook of Homer deserves to be ridiculed.
https://world.hey.com/otar/remembering-what-you-read-8b70cf6...
Maybe you should take up cycling. Maybe you need to write more. Maybe you aren't eating enough fruit. Maybe you need a little caffeine. Maybe it's the air quality. We don't think it's microplastics.
Your friends who read. Maybe it's their fault. They're not printing enough. Or sending enough screenshots. Why haven't you caught them outside on street medians reading out loud? To whoever. They're not setting for you the right example.
Audio books won't cut it. Hey big guy why don't stick one a them foam feet thingies in between ya toes while ya at it huh! And cut some cucumbers to recess the bags under ya eyes so people wont mistake ya for a guy who actually reads his books and will not following the family to their trip to Monaco this summer, no, sorry Donna, I'll be here at home with the books. The dog will have to learn to fend on its own as will the plants, your niece and nephew.
Read books you enjoy.
One thing that have made it easier for be though has been the decline of everything else. As someone pointed out, the internet isn't the internet we grew up with, TV shows mostly suck now and are all designed for binge watching which leaves me feeling physically ill. Same with e.g. YouTube, there are still creators who's content I enjoy, but the YouTube algorithm seems to force me out of a tangent and preferably into Shorts. Much of this algorithmicly pushed content makes me feel ill, so I try to steer clear of it.
So now I buy used books, most happens to be published in the 1970s for some reason. There are so many out there that I'll never run out of things to read and at €1-2 per books, it's cheap.