How to read 5x more books
It’s pretty simple. You don’t read the books, you listen to them.

I’m a slow reader and can read maybe a book a month on average. Long books would stop me in my tracks for months (looking at you, Atlas Shrugged). I can only find at most an hour per night to read and I wasn’t getting through books as fast as I’d like to.
Audible, an audio book app from Amazon, is a game changer. I now listen to books when I’m commuting or working out and it makes both activities more enjoyable. I now have an extra 1.5–2 hours of reading a day. Pro tip for new Audible users is to increase the speed. I started at 1.25x and now use 1.5x. I know some people go 2x but I’m not there yet.
A few gotcha’s with Audible are:
- You can’t purchase books in the app. You can’t buy books from the app, instead you have to buy them on the web and then download them to your phone. My assumption is that’s so apple doesn’t take a cut of the revenue.
- You can’t highlight/underline. I like to highlight or underline passages. You can’t do that with Audible or at least I haven’t found a way to. This is mostly applicable to business / academic reads.
- You can get distracted. Something happens on the subway and 3 minutes later you realize you need to back up. I’m not sure this is specific to Audible, I do this reading the old fashioned way as well.
I encourage everyone to try audiobooks whenever they have time and see how many more books you can read a year. I still read a book the old fashioned way (kindle or hardcover) at night to fall asleep but Audible is a great compliment. You can sync your kindle and Audible but I haven’t tried it and I enjoy reading two books at once.
I hope you enjoy listening to books as much as I do.
P.S. You can follow me on goodreads here.
