5 ms·

Audiobooks, borrowed for free from my library and listened to via the excellent Libby app, have been a life-line over the past four years. I went from 3-4 book

Audiobooks, borrowed for free from my library and listened to via the excellent Libby app, have been a life-line over the past four years. I went from 3-4 books a year to 3-4 books a week, sometimes more. I listen in the bathroom, while exercising, cooking, cleaning, cycling, gardening. My listening speed is typically 1.75x for dense prose and hard science, all the way up to 2.5x for fiction and biographies. The secret is to score a great pair of earbuds; I recommend Jabra Elite 75t. The further the sound is from your ear, the harder it is to parse speech at high speed. You don't start at 2.5x, obviously; start at 1.25x and increase every day or two until you start to zone out. You'll be pleasantly shocked at how quickly you'll ramp up. 1x sounds like the performer overdosed on benzos. In the past year, I've listened to everything Haruki Murakami has written, the entire Wheel of Time series (4.4M words vs 19D5H), and several hundred others. For free. And yes, I still read paper books, too. Sometimes.

metafunctor 4y ago
Wow, that's a lot of books! Assuming 10% of those books are, in some way, in your opinion, better than the other 90%, what would you say were the best couple of dozen books you've listened to? How much would you say the performer affects your perception of the book?
- peteforde 4y ago
  Great questions. I'm going to compile a list for you, and I don't do anything half-way so I hope you check back in a few days and let me know what you liked later on. Great performers tend to be great, at the risk of being reductive and tongue-in-cheek. There are certainly mediocre talents out there, but most people working in that (rapidly growing) industry are really great. I do see names popping up so there's probably awards being given out for audiobook performances at this point. However, the real question you didn't ask is how big of a deal is it for the author to read their own books. Truth be told, if you don't know the author's voice today, chances are the content would be better served by hiring an excellent voice talent. For the authors whose voices you do know... it's hard to imagine a David Sedaris book being read by anyone except David Sedaris (except Tracy Ullman, which will be relevant when my recommendations come). It's not just biographies that need to be read by their authors to be properly enjoyed; everyone from Neil deGrasse Tyson to John Waters bring so much to their books. Whereas I'd pay good money to never listen to Neal Stephenson read anything again. Great dude, but he should stick to writing. There are even books that are made better because they are read by their author. See: Werner Herzog's The Twilight World.
hamburglar 4y ago
I've never really gotten into audiobooks, but my pace of reading paper books has fallen off considerably lately, since I've fallen into a pattern of simply falling asleep when I pick up a book. My girlfriend loves audiobooks because she can "read" while doing chores or walking or whatever, and reads constantly. So I've been considering trying that out, and I have questions for you. First, does this work very well for technical books? I would imagine not very well. Anytime you came across a code sample, a table of information or a diagram, I assume the audiobook rendition of it would be effectively useless. So perhaps the audio approach completely excludes technical reading? Second, do you ever shake the feeling that having a book read to you is somehow qualitatively not as good as reading it from the page? I feel like seeing the written words on the page and the shapes of the sentences and the punctuation and having to interpret the tone and rhythm yourself is part of the experience of consuming literature. Does hearing it feel ... less to you? Is it the kind of thing that you just learn to get over, or does it stick with you? Or perhaps it was never an issue at all?
- user3939382 4y ago
  > First, does this work very well for technical books? I just laughed imaging a professional voice actor reading out a block of code in a stately voice, complete with all the punctuation. "public function getName(Person $user)" xD
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    See my comment above. I did exactly that with Inventing the Future. Maxwell didn't know how to read Mesa, of course, but I gave him the audio for how to read it. Just imagine what a CS professor would do if they read the code off a whiteboard, and do that.
    - hamburglar 4y ago
      Well, the difference is that there's no whiteboard. If you're reading code off a whiteboard, you can shorthand over obvious things like brackets and indentation and whatnot, whereas trying to get a listener to picture a piece of code just by verbally describing it would take a lot more. I agree with your conclusion in the other comment that a lot of code would become unwieldy, but small snippets here and there are ok.
AlbertCory 4y ago
I hired a voice actor, Maxwell Glick, to do the audiobooks for my two books (https://www.amazon.com/Audible-The-Big-Bucks/dp/B0BDBG5VNP/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Audible-The-Big-Bucks/dp/B0BDBG5VNP/r... is the latest. Your speed is interesting, because when I was reviewing his work, I only used 1.5x. Any faster sounded like a cartoon character and I might miss nuances in the dialog, among other things. Someone else mentioned code samples. Fortunately I only had a couple Mesa samples in Inventing the Future and I actually gave him some audio for the way to read them. My guideline was "how would a CS professor read this in class?" There IS a "pronouncing Mesa" epilogue to the manual, which helped. But a book with a whole lot of code in it? I don't think that would work.
- peteforde 4y ago
  The books I tend to listen to share two things in common: they are in English, and they don't have large code samples. I don't doubt that there are excellent non-fiction books with source code - heck, probably some fiction as well - but listening at any speed sounds like something I wouldn't do unless my eyes were disabled. In addition to (good) earbuds and practice listening at higher speeds, I suspect that not all pitch correction algos are created equal. If you are simply speeding up audio without correcting for pitch, it's going to sound like a cartoon even at 1.25x. However, the main thing is concentration. I do not perceive that the words are sped up, because I am very actively listening to it while doing wrote, repetitive things. I have to stop the audio if I'm doing anything that requires any attention, computation or decision making whatsoever. Cooking soup? No problem. Following a recipe? NOPE. Picking up vegetables? Sure. Reading ingredients? Not a chance. Biking on a path? Sure. Driving? Not a chance.
jpmattia 4y ago
> I recommend Jabra Elite 75t. Discontinued as of this month: "FYI Our current top pick, the Jabra Elite Active 75t, has been discontinued and is no longer available." https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-workout-headphones/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-workout-head...
- peteforde 4y ago
  This makes about as much sense as cancelling Arrested Development and Firefly. While I'm confident that there are other earbuds, I'm tempted to hit eBay right now to pick up a spare set. They are that good.

metafunctor 4y ago

Wow, that's a lot of books! Assuming 10% of those books are, in some way, in your opinion, better than the other 90%, what would you say were the best couple of dozen books you've listened to? How much would you say the performer affects your perception of the book?

peteforde 4y ago
Great questions. I'm going to compile a list for you, and I don't do anything half-way so I hope you check back in a few days and let me know what you liked later on. Great performers tend to be great, at the risk of being reductive and tongue-in-cheek. There are certainly mediocre talents out there, but most people working in that (rapidly growing) industry are really great. I do see names popping up so there's probably awards being given out for audiobook performances at this point. However, the real question you didn't ask is how big of a deal is it for the author to read their own books. Truth be told, if you don't know the author's voice today, chances are the content would be better served by hiring an excellent voice talent. For the authors whose voices you do know... it's hard to imagine a David Sedaris book being read by anyone except David Sedaris (except Tracy Ullman, which will be relevant when my recommendations come). It's not just biographies that need to be read by their authors to be properly enjoyed; everyone from Neil deGrasse Tyson to John Waters bring so much to their books. Whereas I'd pay good money to never listen to Neal Stephenson read anything again. Great dude, but he should stick to writing. There are even books that are made better because they are read by their author. See: Werner Herzog's The Twilight World.

hamburglar 4y ago

I've never really gotten into audiobooks, but my pace of reading paper books has fallen off considerably lately, since I've fallen into a pattern of simply falling asleep when I pick up a book. My girlfriend loves audiobooks because she can "read" while doing chores or walking or whatever, and reads constantly. So I've been considering trying that out, and I have questions for you. First, does this work very well for technical books? I would imagine not very well. Anytime you came across a code sample, a table of information or a diagram, I assume the audiobook rendition of it would be effectively useless. So perhaps the audio approach completely excludes technical reading? Second, do you ever shake the feeling that having a book read to you is somehow qualitatively not as good as reading it from the page? I feel like seeing the written words on the page and the shapes of the sentences and the punctuation and having to interpret the tone and rhythm yourself is part of the experience of consuming literature. Does hearing it feel ... less to you? Is it the kind of thing that you just learn to get over, or does it stick with you? Or perhaps it was never an issue at all?

user3939382 4y ago
> First, does this work very well for technical books? I just laughed imaging a professional voice actor reading out a block of code in a stately voice, complete with all the punctuation. "public function getName(Person $user)" xD
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  See my comment above. I did exactly that with Inventing the Future. Maxwell didn't know how to read Mesa, of course, but I gave him the audio for how to read it. Just imagine what a CS professor would do if they read the code off a whiteboard, and do that.
  - hamburglar 4y ago
    Well, the difference is that there's no whiteboard. If you're reading code off a whiteboard, you can shorthand over obvious things like brackets and indentation and whatnot, whereas trying to get a listener to picture a piece of code just by verbally describing it would take a lot more. I agree with your conclusion in the other comment that a lot of code would become unwieldy, but small snippets here and there are ok.

AlbertCory 4y ago

I hired a voice actor, Maxwell Glick, to do the audiobooks for my two books (https://www.amazon.com/Audible-The-Big-Bucks/dp/B0BDBG5VNP/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Audible-The-Big-Bucks/dp/B0BDBG5VNP/r... is the latest. Your speed is interesting, because when I was reviewing his work, I only used 1.5x. Any faster sounded like a cartoon character and I might miss nuances in the dialog, among other things. Someone else mentioned code samples. Fortunately I only had a couple Mesa samples in Inventing the Future and I actually gave him some audio for the way to read them. My guideline was "how would a CS professor read this in class?" There IS a "pronouncing Mesa" epilogue to the manual, which helped. But a book with a whole lot of code in it? I don't think that would work.

peteforde 4y ago
The books I tend to listen to share two things in common: they are in English, and they don't have large code samples. I don't doubt that there are excellent non-fiction books with source code - heck, probably some fiction as well - but listening at any speed sounds like something I wouldn't do unless my eyes were disabled. In addition to (good) earbuds and practice listening at higher speeds, I suspect that not all pitch correction algos are created equal. If you are simply speeding up audio without correcting for pitch, it's going to sound like a cartoon even at 1.25x. However, the main thing is concentration. I do not perceive that the words are sped up, because I am very actively listening to it while doing wrote, repetitive things. I have to stop the audio if I'm doing anything that requires any attention, computation or decision making whatsoever. Cooking soup? No problem. Following a recipe? NOPE. Picking up vegetables? Sure. Reading ingredients? Not a chance. Biking on a path? Sure. Driving? Not a chance.

jpmattia 4y ago

> I recommend Jabra Elite 75t. Discontinued as of this month: "FYI Our current top pick, the Jabra Elite Active 75t, has been discontinued and is no longer available." https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-workout-headphones/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-workout-head...

peteforde 4y ago
This makes about as much sense as cancelling Arrested Development and Firefly. While I'm confident that there are other earbuds, I'm tempted to hit eBay right now to pick up a spare set. They are that good.