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Comment by Ronsenshi | Hacker News Reader

You're not the only one. I don't dislike audio books, but compared to text it's just not as immersive. When reading a a good text book I get transported into it. I visualize whatever author wrote and eventually it's not even reading - it's more like a flow of information.

With audio books I don't get that - which is OK for some types of books, but definitely not something I'd pick for fiction.

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I listen to audiobooks a lot and I generally love them but sometimes I do miss the ability to easily skip back and re-listen to a particular short section again - yes you can skip back a fixed amount easily but that takes you to a random point in the text.

Local, sentence/paragraph level, navigation in audiobooks is really bad.

"Stop Listening"

"Stopped"

"Go back to where Lisa enters the cave"

"Rewinding"

"....."

Which sounds great apart from the fact I have an accent that makes voice control work about 50% of the time, so any attempt by me to use it rapidly descends into a comedy scene with me doing a Malcolm Tucker impersonation.

You may enjoy this sketch from Burnistoun, a Scottish TV programme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU

Yeah, I am Scottish so I was carefully avoiding linking to that sketch - it is far too accurate!

This is something I've noticed with podcasts as well. The tools and players available are atrocious and I don't understand why everybody puts up with them.

Which players have you tried?

I find the players have lots of microfeatures I wouldn't even have thought of - like if I've stopped playing a podcast in Pocket Casts & pick it up a couple of hours later, it rewinds a few seconds so I get the context of what I was listening to again.

Pocket Casts is nowhere near as good since the NPR acquisition, and probably not as good as Overcast or Castro or any iPhone clients, but I definitely wouldn't say it's atrocious.

All of them. And most of them are glorified radios. The few that do expose functionality for navigation and bookmarking within a podcast episode (beyond rewinding or FF by x seconds), they make it way too unintuitive to use and make you use too many clicks to use it. And there's almost no functionality around saving and organizing the episodes you've listened to. Hell, most podcast apps don't even provide a way to check your played history in a sane way (if at all). Where in the fuck is the Evernote of podcast apps? I want to tag episodes, organize them into folders, link different episodes, bookmark certain spots of an episode, tag the bookmarks, add comments/notes at certain times AND TAG THESE AND ORGANIZE THESE, etc.

Okay, I admit - that is an absolutely brilliant idea. What you've described is exactly how I use Pocket with blog posts (highlighting, searchable note taking, tagging) but for podcasts. Count me in.

I know Overcast made some attempts at timecode bookmarking & sharing snippets, but I don't think their approach is the solution. (I'm on Android so I've never got to try it.)

https://www.cultofmac.com/622288/how-to-share-podcast-clips-...

Yeah. That interactive, metatextual layer is missing for me for podcasts. I have a decent process (that I'm still refining) for saving and organizing websites/articles/books/pdfs/notes, and if I'm looking for something, I can find it reasonably quickly, but podcasts are this blackhole where information and context go to get lost.

> https://www.cultofmac.com/622288/how-to-share-podcast-clips-....

Okay, that feature is pretty damn cool. Add that to my must-haves in my dream podcast app.

I get far more engrossed with books than listening to audio plus listening to a story makes me feel tired which I think is a hangover from bedtime stories as a kid.

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