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Comment by loveparade | Hacker News Reader

I love listening to audiobooks at 1.5x-2x speed while I'm walking outside. I can get through 100 books a year this way. Of course I don't take notes or think deeply about the content. Who needs that? In fact, I have no idea which books I've read this year! Or last year! All I want is cross stuff off my vanity to-do list consisting of books collected from HN and get a feeling of accomplishment. And I can tell others about it! 100 books a year! /s

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100 books a year? Those are rookie numbers!

Don't forget that you have two ears, why not listen to two books simultaneously? Left ear can have personal life hack books and right ear can have business books

But you know what I like more than materialistic things? Knowledge. In fact, I’m a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold two thousand new books that I bought. It’s like the billionaire Warren Buffett says, “the more you learn, the more you earn.”

Two books? Hah, I have one book in each ear, read one with each eye and use my fingers to read an additional two written in braille.

You can improve with using your feet too

Very unrealistic, how can I do that while running a marathon?

That’s a startup idea! Braille display shoes. Read 10 characters at a time inside your shoes!

Shit up and take my money, to the moon!

"an additional two written in braille."

So you've only got two fingers, huh? Time to 10X your knowledge stream brah!!!

For a second I wasn't sure if you were sarcastic or not. Apparently the former.

Audiobooks even when sped up are still a lot slower than reading. You wouldn't ridicule someone for reading fast, would you. Reading fast is usually seen as an advantage and a sign of reading maturity.

But if you listen to a lot of audiobooks you easily learn to do it faster than normal speaking speed. I'm told that blind people, can comfortably handle 4x times normal speed.

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19241219/

I thinking reading fast is a sign of immaturity. When I was a teen I swallowed books whole. I absorbed sentences in a glance. But as I've got older I've slowed down. I re-read more. I choose more carefully. I get deeper into things. Fast reading is for skimming over the surface of things. Which is fine but definitely not a sign of maturity.

I agree generally, but it depends what you're reading. There are many books that "could have been an article" -- these might not be worth reading slowly.

> You wouldn't ridicule someone for reading fast, would you.

I might well, if it were evident they prioritized speed of completion over comprehension and retention of the content, and if they also insisted against all intuition and much evidence that speed of completion were the only figure of merit.

The fundamental limiting factor here is not time, it's attention.

Regardless of the speed, audio books are inferior to read books because attention wanders

I love listening to audiobooks at 0.5x speed to really comprehend what I'm listening to. The people who listen at 1x speed are just there for the experience of listening to something and not to get anything from the book. /s

I have found that listening to audiobooks at 1.35X speed is the "best value" speed. It shortens the amount of time wasted on silence and is still comprehensible. Going any faster than that leads to some incomprehension and strange audio distortions.

I find that reading rather than listening to an audiobook is the superior form of consumption for knowledge retention however.

I assume this will be different for each individual.

Now now, you're forgetting the crucial part where you post everywhere about how you've listened to <book recommended by your favorite tech influencer, who hasn't read it himself> and that it was a life changing experience.

You couldn't quote a single line from it and it's most likely some vapid bullshit in that book anyways, but that makes you _better_ than those non readers.

Yep. Vapid doesn't even begin to describe it. Ironically these kinds of books could have been pamphlets or blog posts.

Which is why few in this hustler culture tend to go anywhere. They're all just wasting each other's time.

sitting around online making up guys and getting mad at them

People read for different reasons. Some people hope to "take notes and think deeply" about a topic. Some people read for fun. Others hope to gain a broad overview of a subject but aren't hoping to remember everything they read. What's wrong with listening to an audio-book on high speed if you are reading for one of the latter two reasons?

I've known a dude who taught at university on the side, besides working on logistics of all things, he said he had a mild form of dyslexia, so he taught himself to read books, by reading each page, on each side at the same time, as some form of compensation. I don't know if I could believe it, but there's document cases of this, and his retention and speed was crazy fast. Could be that he just taught himself to glance and chunk structures really fast, which is what I do, if I try to read fast without regard for safety or pleasure.

Yeah, I had to think of the Hustle guy

https://youtu.be/_o7qjN3KF8U

One thing you learn from reading many books, even at 2x, is that many people prefer lots of things differently, and that that works well for them. If listening at 2x is not your thing, I suggest you find another way to learn that lesson. Based on your comment, you still have to learn that.

"Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated." —Paul Valery, quoted by Walter Benjamin, Storyteller

You forgot your youtube link

You are the perfect customer for AI generated books....i love it.

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