There are a lot of ways to consume books these days. I still have a preference for the old fashioned style of paper and text but then reading electronically has tremendous benefits especially when traveling. It is very easy to throw a couple of books onto a Kindle/Nook or some other reader and certainly much easier that packing War and Peace and Middlemarch into your carry on luggage!
However the other important way to appreciate books is via audiobook. This may seem like cheating. It’s not really reading in the strictest sense but I love audiobooks for a number of reasons:
- Convenience – sometimes one doesn’t want to read or it is impossible to do so. The classic for me is car journeys. Even 15 minutes in the car provides the time to reacquaint oneself with a story. I tend you put audiobooks on my phone and I can pipe it through the car audio and away we go. Obviously there are other opportunities such as the treadmill or walking the dogs where losing oneself in a book definitely makes time pass faster
- Story telling – most of the readers, at least the readers of classic fiction, are actors. Often they are well known actors but always they bring a great deal of life to the story. They use voices for the characters, they have great inflection and nuance in their story telling and this really brings books to life. I am not sure how easy I would have found Don Quixote to complete without an audiobook
- Encouragement to read – There is definitely enjoyment in the printed word. There is nothing to stop you reading a book you have previously listened to. The two genres are so different they both add to the overall experience
- Widening your reading time – personally I normally have at least 2 books on the go at any time; one that I am reading, the other that is on audio. It is perfectly possible to read two stories at once (we tend to follow multiple series on TV for example) but it makes it easier when they are in two different formats
- Speed – not all of us are speedy readers. I have tried to follow the lead set by Tim Ferris on speed reading and it has helped a little, but still, listening to a book may well be faster than reading it. Right now I am listening to Bleak House and the audio is over 48 hours long. I know it would take me longer to physically read this complex book than that!
There are, of course, some cons to audiobooks and this is what I have found:
- It feels like cheating – It really isn’t reading in the strictest sense
- It can be hard to follow plot nuances – in books with complex plots and a multitude of story lines and many characters (Dickens is the classic example) it is sometimes necessary to flip back in the narrative and re-familiarize oneself with these details. This is much harder to to on an audiobook
- The reader is all important – some are better than others, but generally they are all very good and it is a matter of personal taste. I wouldn’t want to listen to a reader for 48 hours unless I was enamored with their reading style.
- Cost – Axis 360 audiobooks can be a little more pricey than written text but if this is an issue, one can often take audiobooks from the library these days using the application which I strongly recommend and use frequently.
I highly recommend audiobooks – they drastically reduce your reading downtime! There are a couple of sites I recommend although there are a many options and they are worth perusing. These are the ones I tend to use:
Audible – this is an Amazon company and you can access their books from the main site too
Both offer free trials and free books to get started!