I posted earlier on the advantages of incorporating audiobooks into your study methods. One of the main problems I desribed was that there was poor selection with regards to audiobooks and particularly with regard to higher level subjects. I’ve recently found a way around this that makes using audiobooks even more of an obvious decision for me. I’ve started using text to speech conversion to make audiobooks from ebooks. The inspiration was from wedrifid.
Here is a sample of the best TTS voice I have been able to find. This method produces suprisingly high quality audiobooks with suprisingly little effort.
I can get through around 2 − 5 books a day by listening to audiobooks.
I’ve been doing this since November last year and recommend it.
My list of fully listened books has 109 entries now. I’ve found that an important thing in determining whether a book works well in text-to-speech form is how much of it you can miss and still understand what’s going on, or, how dense it is. Genre-wise, narrative or journalistic nonfiction and memoirs make especially good listening; most popular nonfiction works decently; history and fiction are pretty hard; and scholarly and technical writing are pretty much impossible.
A lot of writing on the internet, like blog posts, works well too. I have some scripts for scraping websites, converting them into an intermediate ebook form and then into text-to-speech audiobooks. If I encounter an interesting blog with large archives this is usually how I consume it nowadays.
There’s also obviously the issue of comprehension, which I’d say definitely is lower when listening than when reading. But, 1) literally at least 95% of the stuff that I’ve listened to I never would have read, it would either have sat on my to-read list forever* or I wouldn’t have thought it was worth the time and effort in the first place 2) you can view this as a way to discover stuff that’s worth deeper study, like skimming, 3) it takes less mental effort than reading, and 4) there are a lot of times when you couldn’t read but can still listen, so it’s not a tradeoff. There are also some interesting ways in which texts are more memorable when listening, because parts of the text get associated to the place you were in and/or the activity you were doing when you were listening to that part.
Compared to traditional audiobooks, there’s the disadvantage that fiction seems to be harder to make sense of in text-to-speech form, but other than that, you get all the benefits of traditional audiobooks plus it’s faster** and you can listen to anything.
* Whereas during the last year I’ve been getting to experience the new and pleasant phenomenon of actually getting to strike off entries from my to-read list pretty often.
** You can speed up the text-to-speech, and while you can also speed up traditional audiobooks, you can speed up the text-to-speech more because it’s always the same voice instead of a different one for every book so you can get used to listening to it at higher and higher speeds—I currently do 344, 472 and 612 WPM for normal, fast, and extra-fast-but-still-comprehensible respectively (these numbers have been stable for about the past six months).
I don’t have a much problem listening to to scholarly stuff what problems did you have with it? Most of the books I listen to recently probably count as scholarly. I don’t think that my comprehension is lower than when I read conventionally, actually, I need to test it, though.
What method do you use for converting blogs? Have you found a way of converting a whole blog at once or do you convert articles individually?
Well I had in mind how at one time or another I tried to listen to Inside Jokes, Folly of Fools, In Gods we Trust, Godel’s Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What To Do About It and quit each of them because it wasn’t working, I was missing too much and wasn’t enjoying it. Maybe “scholarly” isn’t the best word I could have chosen to describe them, and maybe I was just doing it wrong, and should have just gone slower and concentrated better.
The result of a converted blog is this. I just have to write a new parser for every new blog, which usually takes maybe 15 minutes, and the rest is automated.
Wow, those are some awesome books, thanks. I listen to the The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What To Do About It and at 3.8x speed and I think I understood it fine.
I’d love to be able to convert blogs… Can’t find any service to do it for me.
I posted earlier on the advantages of incorporating audiobooks into your study methods. One of the main problems I desribed was that there was poor selection with regards to audiobooks and particularly with regard to higher level subjects. I’ve recently found a way around this that makes using audiobooks even more of an obvious decision for me. I’ve started using text to speech conversion to make audiobooks from ebooks. The inspiration was from wedrifid.
Here is a sample of the best TTS voice I have been able to find. This method produces suprisingly high quality audiobooks with suprisingly little effort.
I can get through around 2 − 5 books a day by listening to audiobooks.
I’ve been doing this since November last year and recommend it.
My list of fully listened books has 109 entries now. I’ve found that an important thing in determining whether a book works well in text-to-speech form is how much of it you can miss and still understand what’s going on, or, how dense it is. Genre-wise, narrative or journalistic nonfiction and memoirs make especially good listening; most popular nonfiction works decently; history and fiction are pretty hard; and scholarly and technical writing are pretty much impossible.
A lot of writing on the internet, like blog posts, works well too. I have some scripts for scraping websites, converting them into an intermediate ebook form and then into text-to-speech audiobooks. If I encounter an interesting blog with large archives this is usually how I consume it nowadays.
There’s also obviously the issue of comprehension, which I’d say definitely is lower when listening than when reading. But, 1) literally at least 95% of the stuff that I’ve listened to I never would have read, it would either have sat on my to-read list forever* or I wouldn’t have thought it was worth the time and effort in the first place 2) you can view this as a way to discover stuff that’s worth deeper study, like skimming, 3) it takes less mental effort than reading, and 4) there are a lot of times when you couldn’t read but can still listen, so it’s not a tradeoff. There are also some interesting ways in which texts are more memorable when listening, because parts of the text get associated to the place you were in and/or the activity you were doing when you were listening to that part.
Compared to traditional audiobooks, there’s the disadvantage that fiction seems to be harder to make sense of in text-to-speech form, but other than that, you get all the benefits of traditional audiobooks plus it’s faster** and you can listen to anything.
* Whereas during the last year I’ve been getting to experience the new and pleasant phenomenon of actually getting to strike off entries from my to-read list pretty often.
** You can speed up the text-to-speech, and while you can also speed up traditional audiobooks, you can speed up the text-to-speech more because it’s always the same voice instead of a different one for every book so you can get used to listening to it at higher and higher speeds—I currently do 344, 472 and 612 WPM for normal, fast, and extra-fast-but-still-comprehensible respectively (these numbers have been stable for about the past six months).
I don’t have a much problem listening to to scholarly stuff what problems did you have with it? Most of the books I listen to recently probably count as scholarly. I don’t think that my comprehension is lower than when I read conventionally, actually, I need to test it, though.
What method do you use for converting blogs? Have you found a way of converting a whole blog at once or do you convert articles individually?
Well I had in mind how at one time or another I tried to listen to Inside Jokes, Folly of Fools, In Gods we Trust, Godel’s Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What To Do About It and quit each of them because it wasn’t working, I was missing too much and wasn’t enjoying it. Maybe “scholarly” isn’t the best word I could have chosen to describe them, and maybe I was just doing it wrong, and should have just gone slower and concentrated better.
The result of a converted blog is this. I just have to write a new parser for every new blog, which usually takes maybe 15 minutes, and the rest is automated.
Wow, those are some awesome books, thanks. I listen to the The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What To Do About It and at 3.8x speed and I think I understood it fine.
I’d love to be able to convert blogs… Can’t find any service to do it for me.