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Tried parsing through the first few paragraphs; can someone offer a tl;dr of how Audible is assaulting leisure time? Is it because Audible can be listened to w
by alehul 7y ago
Tried parsing through the first few paragraphs; can someone offer a tl;dr of how Audible is assaulting leisure time?
Is it because Audible can be listened to while performing other tasks or going about your day, and it removes the previously quiet, uninterrupted time of the day to ponder?
- dang 7y agoThe article looks like a profile of Audible and the growth of the audiobook market, as well as some sort of critique of it. Let's not focus only on the critique part. Titles tend to do that—focus attention on too small a spot—so we've replaced the title above with a wider phrase from the article. Actually, we already did replace the title with the subtitle in the hope of widening the focus, but it didn't work.
- kurthr 7y agoKinda, but I admit to being confused as well... 'It’s simplistic but not entirely inaccurate to say that Audible’s parent, Amazon, is to book publishing what Facebook and Google are to magazines: the troll under the bridge whose idea of a toll is to devour consumers and competitors whole.' and 'On the train to get coffee with a well-meaning writer twenty years your senior who will advise you to “climb the ladder” like she did. By listening, you partially reclaim the lost hours, preserving some ghost of an alternate universe where you don’t have to do what you’re doing, and you’re on the couch reading the old-fashioned way instead.' Personally, I find audio-books almost completely different from active reading... mostly distracted entertainment rather than true immersion.
- ghaff 7y agoI don't find that with audiobooks at all. When I commuted regularly they were a good source of ad-free interesting content on my drive. (Though some books work better as audiobooks than others.) I pretty much never listen to them now. For occasional drives, podcasts are a much better fit because it's hard to dip in and out of books with multi-week gaps. But, then, I mostly don't much care for random background entertainment--even music much of the time and certainly not talk.
- Causality1 7y agoAudiobooks are rather unique in that you have to maintain a degree of mental discipline to avoid giving into the temptation to treat them as background noise. My personal strategy is to stick to lighthearted podcasts when I'm doing something that requires cognitive attention like web browsing or gaming and save the audiobooks for truly routine tasks like commuting to work or cutting the grass. I've also gotten good results from reading the first chapter of a book to firmly place the characters and setting in my mind and then switching to the audiobook.
- matwood 7y agoI'm similar, except when I'm at the computer I only listen to music. I could turn on a podcast, but will hear absolutely zero of what is said. Podcasts are great for the gym, drive, and yard work though. For books, I prefer to read. The pacing of reading allows me to think more deeply about the content. Admittedly, I do not read a lot of throw away novels. If I did, maybe they could take the place of podcasts.