I have one. It's well worth it. I've listened to more than 200 books in the last two years in my spare time. It's a skill that takes time but I absorb books just as well now via listening.

tts programs have also gotten much better over the last 5 years or so, entirely adequate for most technical reading/articles/non fiction. it's an imperfect solution but it does reopen the doors to a vast swathe of writings that will likely never be worthwhile for a human to narrate.

Aside, Audible is pretty scummy. Consider a less scummy alternative like Libro.fm.

- Audible's "Cancel membership" flow is multiple pages long and makes you think you've canceled it when you actually have to keep progressing through additional "I want to cancel" clicks. I thought I canceled the free trial when I hadn't. When complaining to some friends of mine, they also made the same mistake.

- When you finally cancel your membership, you've only put in a request to cancel it. The actual cancellation will happen in 30 days. This means you're always billed one more time after cancellation (I couldn't believe this when I saw it).

- When your membership is finally canceled, you lose all of your tokens (you get one per month). So if you have 5 tokens saved up and you want to pause your membership for a couple months because your bank balance is low, too bad. (Note: I've since realized that Audible lets you pause your membership once per year for 1-3 months, but this is an unsatisfying solution and I only discovered it in their support forum. I didn't even see the option while canceling twice.)

- Because canceling your membership has a 30-day delay that charges you once more, you're basically buying one last token that's going to get immediately deleted. This means that if you're billed on the 1st of the month but you cancel (ahem, submit a cancel request) on the 2nd of the month, 29 days later you're going to be charged one last time and receive a token that is deleted within 24 hours.

I haven't used Libro.fm yet (have a sour taste in my mouth from Audible), but their tokens never expire and canceling ("pausing", in their language) membership doesn't delete tokens.

I want to write a blog post that makes these points more eloquently, with evidence, but I haven't had the energy.

"Wait, what if we charge people once more when they try to cancel our service?" is one of the most ridiculous experiences I've ever had. Even worse than that one time I had to cancel a cam-site subscription by uncommenting-out the <button>Cancel</button> in the html.

The world is only as good as the things we choose to tolerate.

I have had an Audible subscription for many years and I've been very happy with it.

I have the exact same issue. If it’s video, my eyes (and brain) are occupied and not easily distracted. But audio alone, unless it’s like radio where you don’t care if you miss something, has been difficult to keep attention on.

Unlike eBooks, where you can easily go back by scanning with your eyes, audiobooks can only provide you a way to quickly go back in time, not context (unless the context is directly related to time, like rewinding for 10 or 20 seconds, for example).

I’ve been thinking of listening to audiobooks while doing chores and not bothering about missing some words or sentences. But I’d have to choose a casual work so that I don’t regret missing anything.

By any chance do you have adhd? Because same.

Same here. This is also the problem I have with podcasts.

Yep, I have to physically read books if I want to ingest any information from them.

I find if I set the playback speed to 1.3-1.5x, I’m forced to listen much more closely.

Give it a shot! It’s maybe a bit like that Thinking Fast And Slow story about the kids who scored better on tests with blurry questions.

Try starting with something suspense based that does not have convoluted writing and really grabs your attention, like a Dan Brown book or Harry Potter (read by Stephen Fry). Also, go for the professional readings (i.e. not most of Librivox) and pay careful attention to what reviews say about the reader, as their performance is essential for comprehension. Play around with listening speed a bit (both too slow and too fast won’t work, depending on the material). I could easily increase material complexity after getting through suspense-based books.

I could not get into audiobooks (even after years of listening to scientific talk podcasts) until I got hold of Origin by Dan Brown in an Audible trial, and ended up being gripped by the 20 hour book for two weeks straight. It has been 15+ audiobooks from various sources per year for me since then, which has really enriched my life. Retention is better since I finish the books that can be integrated with various activities not requiring verbal thinking way faster.

Listening to audiobooks while riding a bicycle worked well for me. Driving, walking and any other physical activity that can be done in "zombie mode" works well with audiobooks, radio.

No longer use a bike since I moved.

I as a parent can understand that, but what it was asked is how to read a lot of books if you have kids

I think the answer is: you have to decide what activity you want to trade for that.

> an important part of being a good parent is self-care

Kids (also) learn by example, by imitating their parents doing their own things. So, not only self care, but also your things. Obviously, common sense, a toddler requires more attention than a teenager, won’t read nor play piano right away. Some things, like playing music, cooking (and for whatever reason, vacuuming) seems to have early impact :)

The other way I have heard the same idea, but phrased with slightly different motivation:

Your children are important part of your life, and you are important part of their life (especially in the early years). This has also an implication: Who actually is this person they get to know?

I don't have kids, but coincidentally discussed these kind of childhood memories with my spouse quite recently after someone made similar complaint. I probably hsve no idea of time commitments required of very small children. However, about at the age we were old enough not to be disruptive (if supplied with reading material when necessary), both our parents took us to their adult things: bird watcher society meetings, social events, art museums, bookshops, and seminars. It is probable our parents did their peronal own things less than they would have if we had not existed, but we agreed we did not suffer from it, and learned quite a deal.

There is anyway the peculiar something about way kids' experience thing and what of them remain when we grow anyway. Undoubtledly I have learned things much useful I don't remember much about, like how to walk. For me, the images I can call up are the odd, random, small ones. To a child many things are novel in this world, and one knows there is lots of things in adults' world to uncover. Yet because of that lack of perspective, various things may be treated as the normal. As an added complication, one's perspective on childhood memories changes and gains different color when one grows up.

Once, while visiting relatives on a road-trip, tthere was half a day long detour to see an exhibition of non-figurative sculptures whose details I don't recall. I do remember the calm, cool, air-conditioned atmosphere, the white bright walls, the smell of the museum, and the impression of uncanny puzzlement and imcomprehension left by the lone melancholy video installation in a small, separate darkened room in one of the exhibition halls. I was about 12 years old and quite bored. I surmise I was brought along mostly because father wanted to go, maybe because he wanted to give me educational experience about modern art, but most certainly there was any no other option suitable for preteen's inclinations given the circumstances of road trip, and as I said, he wanted to go. Nevertheless, despite the boredom, today the memory certainly is far more interesting than what I recall of the most of the kid-oriented activities I liked then better and also took lot of my parents' time.

It is difficult for me to judge the value of that museum experience -- is it because of the exhibition was remarkable or does it feel remarkable because I remember it? It might even be a partially constructed memory from several similar museum trips. And after all, the thing I remember especially well, much better and concretely than anything else, one of my earliest childhood memories (that I have photographied evidence of), is something utterly mundane, namely the large, black, late 80s mat we had on the living room. In retrospect, it was horrendously ugly on its own right as soon as the TRON aesthetic went out of style, but the reason I remember it was that it had this repeating, neon-colored rectangle pattern, rows and columns, one symmetrically after other. To my eternal dislike, the pattern repeated regularly until it did not: the final row of rectangles at one end were shorter than they should have been given the rest of the pattern. No matter how I counted or measured or tried to mentally rotate the damned thing in my head, there was no solution, no escape, the thing was always asymmetrical. (I amuse myself thinking this may have something to do with me deciding to study math and CS in university later.) Thus one of possibly life-defining experiences was the rug my parents bought years before I was born, and presumably thrown away while I was in primary school (it disappeared and I never inquired about it).

Of childrens' fiction authors, I think ones such as Roald Dahl, Dickens, Lemony Snicket, maybe Rowling (the very first chapters of Philosopher's Stone) capture something of this aspect to watching the world unfold.

Our local library makes it pretty easy. Ours works through an app called Libby that connects with my library card and I then download books to the kindle.

The counterpoint is that it’s unlikely you’ll switch to replying to poorly thought out comments on hackernews, for an example, when you’re on a dedicated reading device than when you’re on just another app on your internet connected attention thief of a device.

Cool. I do have it on my iPad (tablet) to read when I forgot my kindle. It hasn't happen in 3+ years. However, I forgotten my iPad a lot of times and not my Kindle. :-)

My phone (iPhone 11 Pro that will likely last for 2+ more years) is just a really good camera, that has some phone function with the usual calendar, maps, etc. I avoid phone calls as much as I can.

Speed does help. I read up and practice speed-reading for quite a while. I'm no longer interested in the number of books read per year but I'm more picky these days, digesting the best I can of the lesser number of quality books that I read.

I still do speed-reading when I stumble on part of the book that are not interesting to me or I have read very similar concepts before (most non-fiction books in the same genre).

For context, I used to hit 60-70 books per year when I was counting. This year, due to the Pandemic (last time I checked) I have read over 70+ books as picked up by Goodread from Kindle. So, I will likely be hitting about 100 in total this year.

But yes, I will slow down and try to be more picky ahead.

There are a couple of super easy techniques you can implement. I got mine from the Tim Ferriss book 4 hour work week. I think this blog by him provides a good summary: https://tim.blog/2009/07/30/speed-reading-and-accelerated-le...

I won't do this for books I want to enjoy such as fantasy and sci fi (although sometimes through the more monotonous parts). I will use a few of these for articles/papers until I get to a part which is more technical. Good luck!

The time in my life when I read most was when I had a 45 minute rail commute.

It was only for 6 months, and I was going from London out to a small town every morning, so nine times out of ten, I'd be alone in the carriage.

Maybe you can try audiobooks?

Well, this does not work with fiction where it is more fun following minute details of the stories. However, for non-fiction, when you are in a vicinity of the genre one typically read, you can practically pick up and glide along with the text. For instance, I read a lot about Entrepreneurship, Startups, Philosophy, etc. Quite a bit of the context overlap more than one can imagine. There are times when it goes in my head, "yeah! now it will be that, this, but does this have anything different."

During my normal reading speed, if things don't "click", I go back and play back what I read. I don't speed read all the time.

For flights, I like picking up much smaller physical books (200-ish page). You start reading while waiting to board, in the flight, and all the other commute before your destination. I usually give the books to random people, or leave it at places so people can pick it up. For the really good ones, I bring them home for my library. This means, I have also read quite a lot of cheesy, lousy books.

English is also not my mother tongue but is now a primary language. I come from a region in India where for every few square kilometer, one can find a different language and/or dialect. So, we ended up being taught in English, speak in English for more complex words, etc.

I also realized, I used to sit for an hour two days a week just waiting for my daughter with her private tuition. That finishes off quite a lot of books. :-)

I agree completely with most of what you said. The whole system of making books having a minimum number of words doesnt help at all.

And I agree with the fiction part, I know and have witnessed people who have been reading fiction throughout their whole life. As an adult, they enjoy and can easily finish a fiction book in one day. But most of them cannot do the same with non-fiction books. I am at the opposite. I can go through a non-fiction really fast, but would take forever and rarely enjoy reading fiction.

I do notice that too, that some books have really valuable insights and can kinda stand the test of time. Some are just like iterations of multiple books out there thats just retold in a different way