Does anyone else find it hard to remember information from audiobooks?
It seems to me that it's harder to retain knowledge gained from audiobooks. Has this been scientifically validated? What's your approach to counter this effect (if it exists)
For me, podcasts and audiobooks are a (near) complete waste of time.
In practice this means that I am unable to listen to most novels as audiobooks, unless the writing style either has a lot of meandering / redundancy (so when I space out for a while, I still understand what's happening) or the writing style is very active and engaging, especially first person narration without a lot of characters to keep track of. I can "get" The Martian, I cannot however listen to a Russian novel.
In practice I try to optimize for easier books on audio, especially nonfiction, as there's not a ton of characters to remember. I do find that I am able to comprehend harder nonfiction books, as many of them are organized more like a series of essays. But most of the fiction I listen to is very "pop" fiction like Red Shirts.
Even just being able to flip back to a previous section is something that paper books excel at. You get a sense of “what page something is on” (a sense of place) too, which helps the memory and referencing stick. Audio is for straight-through “reading” that doesn’t need to be as “active” because of that, and everything I read that needs to be remembered or studied does need more of an active reading approach
- Not the exact and therefore perfect reading speed as the voice in my head.
- Tonality of the narrator's voice not to my liking. Or wrong emphasis or weird intonation... etc.
- I can't skip text to find the important stuff.
- Whatever else comes to mind.
Audiobooks easily put me in the opposite state of "relaxed" and I retain only my bad feelings but zero information.
I still remember enough (at least I think I do), and it is not rare when I really enjoyed an audiobook that I buy the paper version afterwards.
When I find a good one I’ll start exploring what else they’ve read and pick those up too.
I think my listening brain is wired for conversations not structured texts.