Can I stay focused if I'm just sitting and listening instead of reading? Absolutely not.
There's no 'vs' here. They occupy different spaces. All hail text, whatever form it takes.
The same way you can probably carry a conversation while walking. As long as the other activity doesn't engage the language processing part of the brain there's no conflict. I can't listen while reading, not even small package labels in a grocery store, but I can easily listen while washing dishes or exercising or eating a meal because different sections of the brain are responsible for them and can be active simultaneously.
It definitely becomes more difficult to multitask with harder reads; which is where I prefer to have a book in hand. I'll have to rewind several times per chapter to catch everything. Though it's still doable for some, I'm sure.
I can walk through my local woods and listen very carefully but I don't think I could read a recipe book and pay attention to an audiobook!
So for me and I guess for most people it depends on the intensity of the activity and on the nature of the book. I have gradually found where the balance is for me and I've learned to hit the pause button or rewind 30 seconds.
I also pick different types of books to read and to listen to. I _love_ having an engrossing story as an audiobook. And popular science is a great listen, e.g. I loved the audiobook of Stolen Focus. But with physical books I tend to choose more involved or complex novels (e.g. Deep Wheel Orcadia), poetry, and for non-fiction books that are more specific to my interests (psychotherapy, ceramics).
I prefer reading books, there is something special about holding a book in your hands, insering a book mark or jotting down something illegible in the margins.
I have read a massive amount of books in my time as a psychotherapist for 25 years.
For me, it is far better to read books to fully understand and examine the theories, concepts and methods illustrated by the authors. Marginalia comes to its fore.
However, I do listen to my fair share of audiobook. My main gripe with audiobooks is the readers voice. I cannot stand the squeeky, high pitched, robotic, nasally, sounds like AI, might well be AI, especially american female voices. Being British, just one paragraph and I am immediately put off and turn them off.
I have recently tried to listen to "Into the Into the Deep Wood 01, The Witch by Polina Volkova". I had to stop listening after a few paragraphs. If only the reader had a british voice.
I find switching back and forth between pages to find something you remember reading a few days ago is too difficult with an audiobook. No marginalia with audiobooks.
Do authors select who reads their books. maybe they do not. They should have readers from different countries and different languages.
My favourite audiobook reader is David Thorpe. I have the entire series of Mark Dawson's; John Milton, Beatrix Rose, Isabella Rose, Group 15, plus the novellas and more recently the Charlie cooper series.
I do not experience the same excitement reading those books.
I would say that this could be said about books and the writing style. Whether it is Hemingway's bare bones style or Cormac McCarthy's lack of punctuation, they can put you off the whole book. To be fair, the voice of the narration is in addition to everything in a written book that could put one off.
>Do authors select who reads their books
I am no authority, but as a general rule, authors only have some input in the process, but the publishers are the main and final deciders (unless it is a big name author).
Douglas Adams did a narration of HHGTTG which holds a very dear place for me too.
Taking "99% invisible" for instance, the content in the podcast, on the web or in a book are fundamentally the same level of quality and interest.
Then light novels are pushing the boundaries of what novel literature should look like and we get hundred page books formated as SMS conversations or with ASCII art like layout without much issues.
And on the other end interview and reporting shows are becoming way more researched than the bog standard columns in printed magazines.
Patreon is behind a lot of this change, allowing money to flow to creators whatever their medium, and I'm all for it.
If you remove that and realize reading is a form of communication then it doesn't matter how you make it happen. There was a time when stories and knowledge was mostly shared verbally so it's not like reading is "the truest form".
Do what you like/works for you.
I spend my listening time just trying to catch up with podcasts.
What audio book formats are there, and services. Dare I say it are there any open source ones?
There are many podcast players, are the many audiobook players?
Is there anything really useful in an audiobook player? I guess going through chapters, maybe linking into the actual text.
Over a regular music player, absolutely. Most podcast players treat a podcast as a single file. Audiobooks aren't single file and they become almost unusable without a dedicated player.
You fall asleep with it on? Better hope you remember the timestamp…
We don't need them to battle it out unless for the clicks.
At least that's what I do when I don't have the time for audiobooks. But maybe I shouldn't generalize from my own experience, as everyone is different. For me, audible + the occasional torrent works quite well, and I wouldn't like to use the Spotify interface for audiobooks anyway, considering how bad it is for that use case.
I checked out the FAQs on that page and apparently the 15 hours is just included with the Spotify premium subscription and that let's you listen to 15 hours of anything in their catalog.
Separate from that, you can also purchase books outright and it seems listening to those purchased books won't count towards that 15 Hours.
In that context, those 15 hours are actually kinda appealing to me since it would let you listen to more than the 5 min sample of a book you get on Audible before deciding to outright buy it or you could use that time to listen to a couple shorter books every month without having to purchase it.
Think I might have just convinced myself to look into it a bit more lol (I'm curious how good their catalogue is compared to Audibles)
I use Storytel myself. It's available in many countries. I think it's one of the best services out there for the unlimited listeners.
I use libro.fm. It doesn't have a subscriber model, but they give you DRM-free audio files.
I can't be alone. I get that being able to finish a book anyhow is nice, but isn't that also like leaving half a steak cut on the plate?
Listening was how most of humanity consumed literature for most of history. But the written word has its advantages as well.
But some books I need (or want) to concentrate on to get the full experience. And then I don't want to spoil it by half-listening while doing something else. At the same time, I'm not really able to just sit in the couch doing nothing but listen. So then I prefer a book to actually read, otherwise I end up never getting through it.
Human readers are now little bit better, but when AI recognizes characters and narrators, the came is over.
Worst thing on text-to-speech readers is when you fall asleep and dreams and text get weirdly mixed and you have search afterwards where you dropped off and started dreaming. AI might help on this also because smartwatch recognizes sleep stage quite well.
Same as you, I found some I absolutely hated, especially where they added background music, sound effects, etc. - I just want the book, not a production.
Others I found that a good narrator really added to the experience, especially when they were good at changing voices/accents for different characters speaking. I found that made it a lot easier to track what was going on or who was speaking, especially in books with a large number of characters.
> ...the point of reading is to ingest someone's words and ideas in the most transparent way possible...
For some that's reading, for others that's listening.
They just seem so expensive to me, and the concept still feels like cheating to me.
If you consider a book as an information delivery system or "experience" delivery system, the information and experience is delivered in both formats?
What are you ranking a book on that audiobooks "cheat"?
(This is a genuine question, this topic fascinates me and I'm interested in people's views on it. I've been an audiobook reader a long time, but find the idea that "audiobooks are the same as reading" just as weird as the idea "audiobooks are a lesser / invalid reading".)
I don't mind reading either, it's not like one is better than the other.
They buy books as a status, intellectual symbol, but they couldn't care less about its content. It's an ornament, like a flowers' vase.
I like audiobooks too. It can only be cheating if you believe there is a proper way to experience a book. I enjoy specially some books narrated by their authors, because it adds the nuances of what they consider important, emphasis and information that is lost on paper.
What do they even fill it up with? How is it status when they don’t even know the contents?
Unlimited services like Storytel are pretty cheap. Not library-cheap, but similar to Spotify.
> and the concept still feels like cheating to me.
Nah. It'd only be cheating if you somehow need the practice in physical reading. Like school kids or something. I'm confident in my abilities to parse the written word. I "read" books to absorb the ideas in them and using spoken books allows me to do that while driving or cleaning.
I also find them simply boring to listen to, even the ones of books I love. It feels very passive and I'm always slightly annoyed that I can read significantly faster than the wpm of an audiobook (speeding up an audiobook ruins the performances).
Personally I have a fondness of a few select narrators. One guy who is increadibly talented is Jeff Hayes.
He's almost ruined audiobooks that aren't narated by him for me...
For fiction, having a narrator's voice brings a social context and coloration that might not be appreciated, but when the choice is between not finishing a book (= not buying any sequel any other book after that) or getting a slightly different experience, I'd take the latter, and I think the market is better for it.
Lately, font sizes for printed books has become an issue. I getting old and cannot read with small font sizes.
Meanwhile, publishers seem optimizing for lower prices (less paper) and younger people it seems.
Someone recently told me that hardcover editions tend to have larger font sizes.
Audiobooks are not for me. I’ve tried. Reading hits different. But sure, for self-help, productivity, coding and shit you need to use them, so you use them. Interestingly, the biggest audiobook junkies I know are also heavy readers. They know the difference—and they don’t mix the two.
For me reading is not something I do with either my eyes or ears but my mind.