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Comment by smnrchrds | Hacker News Reader

The unabridged audiobook is just under 24 hours. 16 hours seems short, but not terribly so.

https://www.audible.ca/pd/Moby-Dick-Audiobook/B071NYW4Q1

I believe you could consume all the words in Moby Dick in 16 hours. But it’s one of those “crammed full of metaphors” books that could easily take a seminar to unpack. I don’t pretend to get it, but smarter people than me write articles on its layers of complexity and interpretation[1].

You can read those masterworks at a superficial level and they’re usually somewhat rewarding. Or you can read Dostoyevsky while deep diving on Russian history and get a notably different experience. But it takes a lot longer.

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/08/th...

You can read Dostoyevsky just normally - immersing yourself in story, characters, atmosphere and depression of it.

Overanalysing it kills that pleasure and atmosphere. That is not reading, that is doing seminar.

I generally read audiobooks at 1.5x because 1.0 seems terribly slow to me. This more or less matches my reading pace for printed books, so 16 hours seems right.

1.0 is so slow that I wonder if they record the narrator, then slow them down by a third. It's much slower than people talk.

If I am doing something else while listening, it helps to have it slow down a bit. Maybe that's why audiobooks slow it down from the get go.

Not everyone is native English speaker, and slow pace allows you to get immersed. That people want 1,5 speed or do two things at same time is a sign of our time (appropriate content is cheap snd widely available but we don't have more available leisure time). Society doesn't want people have abundant leisure time, hence 'Bullshit Jobs'.

I slow down some narrators and speed up others because I like content delivered at a specific speed. Leisure time is a reason, but not the only reason.

I'm not a native English speaker either. The thing here is that audiobooks are quite a bit slower than normal speech, which is what we've been trained on all our lives.

People want 1.5 speed because that's what gets the narrator back to a normal speaking speed.

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