I’ve mentioned it in earlier posts, but I like to emphasize once more the use of
audio books; as they allow you to fill a lot of your otherwise-idle time (say,
commuting, running, shopping etc.), you can effectively get a lot more
‘reading’ done.
Obviously, audio books are not very good (unfortunately) for really technical
expositions, but one can use them to read a lot of fiction, popular science,
history, that kind of thing. I’ve been doing that for a few years and I got more
‘reading’ done than I ever thought possible.
Another little ‘trick’ for reading more is to read PDFs and the like with
‘autoscroll’ turned on (at least Evince and Acrobat support this). Using
autoscroll forces me to really concentrate and also allows we to sit back and
‘experience’ the book. Again, this does not work well for highly technical
books, but quite well for more ‘prosaic’ material.
For me what tipped the scale in favor of listening to audiobooks was the 2X feature of my player, which doubles the speed of playback without increasing the pitch. Before then, audiobooks took a very, very long time to get through, which made that format relatively unattractive. Now I will often listen to audiobooks even when I could be reading the books. Another important feature of my player, which greatly increased the value of audiobooks to me, is the “skip back 30 seconds” feature.
My experience with audiobooks is completely different. I found myself unable to get into the flow of listening, constantly getting distracted and losing track of what’s going on. Besides, given that I already put myself under much cognitive load (reading, MOOCs, university), I decided to dedicate the time when I cannot read to reassessing and recalling everything in diffuse mode of thinking. So far, seems like there is no better option.
I’ve mentioned it in earlier posts, but I like to emphasize once more the use of audio books; as they allow you to fill a lot of your otherwise-idle time (say, commuting, running, shopping etc.), you can effectively get a lot more ‘reading’ done.
Obviously, audio books are not very good (unfortunately) for really technical expositions, but one can use them to read a lot of fiction, popular science, history, that kind of thing. I’ve been doing that for a few years and I got more ‘reading’ done than I ever thought possible.
Another little ‘trick’ for reading more is to read PDFs and the like with ‘autoscroll’ turned on (at least Evince and Acrobat support this). Using autoscroll forces me to really concentrate and also allows we to sit back and ‘experience’ the book. Again, this does not work well for highly technical books, but quite well for more ‘prosaic’ material.
For me what tipped the scale in favor of listening to audiobooks was the 2X feature of my player, which doubles the speed of playback without increasing the pitch. Before then, audiobooks took a very, very long time to get through, which made that format relatively unattractive. Now I will often listen to audiobooks even when I could be reading the books. Another important feature of my player, which greatly increased the value of audiobooks to me, is the “skip back 30 seconds” feature.
Yeah! I love those. I use an iTouch, and this (+ free NPR podcasts) is what lets the treadmill fit into my schedule.
My experience with audiobooks is completely different. I found myself unable to get into the flow of listening, constantly getting distracted and losing track of what’s going on. Besides, given that I already put myself under much cognitive load (reading, MOOCs, university), I decided to dedicate the time when I cannot read to reassessing and recalling everything in diffuse mode of thinking. So far, seems like there is no better option.
I use audio books / podcasts some, but I don’t run, have a minimal commute, and so don’t end up getting much time in.