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Comment by runevault | Hacker News Reader

Upside, audio you can consume while doing other things. For super deep dives I certainly agree text is better.

Consume yes, but how much of that do you actually retain when you are doing anything that requires real attention? This seems like one of those things that give you the feeling of getting informed, but in reality you are mostly just wasting your time.

I used to listen to a number of podcasts regularly, but I would repeatedly notice that I barely remembered what the key points were. In the end, I cut down my consumption more and more, and only listen to episodes that I specifically find interesting, and only when I have the time and mental resources to really listen to them.

I listen to podcasts just more of an entertainment and to be vaguely informed and not on topics that I want to deep dive and study.

I suppose it depends on the individual. I personally haven't found podcasts to be worse than written sources when it comes to retention.

Depends what you do at the same time. If you walk your dog or play a video game, you probably retain as much as reading. I mean it's not like people don't skip parts or start thinking about something else when they read.

I really doubt you'll retain as much as dedicated reading if you are listening to a podcast and playing a game. Unless it's a game where you don't need to think/read at all.

Regarding walking your dog: that's true. Walking around is a good way to retain information. That's explained on Moonwalking With Einstein

Why on earth would I listen to a podcast while playing a game? Though TBH I mostly don't much care for background audio when doing other things that involve any real thinking. Podcasts are mostly for driving, cleaning, etc.

I don't do much thinking when playing a FPS game

Completely agree. Back in the before-before time when I would go to an office, the walk in to work was always a great chance to consume some interesting content.

I'm pretty much unable to do this. I think I focus too intently on what I'm consuming. Doing almost anything else lessens my focus on the podcast, and makes me mess up whatever else I'm trying to do. So I basically just sit there and stare into space while listening to one. Because of this I don't tend to consume them very often.

So what about having a text-to-speech program read a book? Doesn't that satisfy both?

I'm probably in the 99th percentile of listening to articles via text to speech but the book experience (especially fiction) is not nearly as good in this form. One difficulty is you're at the mercy of the text quality--visual artifacts and things like that which are easily ignored in visual form become a lot more annoying when listening to them. If you have a clean source, great, but most books you'd want to read aren't in this format.

Do you prefer someone read you a book or reading it yourself?

As a related issue: I just don't understand the audiobook phenomenon. I'm clearly the outsider here. I enjoy reading words, not having them read to me.

I enjoy both but have probably 5x the time for listening compared to reading.

Well, normally I read them myself, but I was replying to:

> Upside, audio you can consume while doing other things

which certainly makes sense. While I haven't done so, I could listen to a book while driving, cooking, housecleaning, etc. Reading a book requires me to do nothing else in the mean time.

> Doesn't [text-to-speech] satisfy both?

It does, and I've 'read' 10s of millions of words like this in the past year. I read long-form articles, nonfiction books, and fiction books like this. (The one thing I don't read like this is formatting-intensive PDFs, such as many text books, and that mainly comes down to limitations of my current setup.)

For content on the web I use either firefox's reader mode, which has TTS, or emacs' eww browser with the read-aloud script. For ebooks, I use nov.el and read-aloud. Either allows me to seamlessly switch between visual reading and listening to TTS. This make binge reading easy since I can avoid eye fatigue.

Incidentally, I think a lot of people dismiss TTS after trying it briefly because they underestimate neuroplasticity. Normally sighted people can become very proficient at listening to TTS at high speeds, but for some reason I've seen a lot of people assume only blind people can become accustomed to it. Once you become accustomed to it, the 'robotic' nature of the voice evaporates and it becomes as easy and intuitive as riding a bike.

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