Listening to Books

Pros & cons of audiobooks, and how to use them efficiently

Now and then I hear friends complaining: “I’m just too busy to read.” Although “too busy” is a commonly deployed excuse, I believe most of these complaints are legit as many of my friends either have kids or run startups, or even both.

We perform mundane tasks everyday: cooking, eating, commuting, working out... These are perfect times to engage one’s mind elsewhere. A great use of time is learning. Reading is usually impractical as eyes are occupied or otherwise divert too much attention, so the ears come to rescue.

Assume audiobooks take ten hours to finish in average, chores take three hours a day, you only use half of these hours to listen, and listen only on the five workdays of 44 workweeks every year. Even so, you can read 44 * 5 * 3 / 2 / 10 = 33 titles every year. That is a decent amount of learning and pleasure that requires no dedicated times.

Similar to some people loving e-books while others hating them with a passion, audiobooks are not for everyone. It is helpful to understand the pros and cons of audiobooks and see where your preference lies.

Pros

Multitasking: The biggest benefit of using audiobooks is to help us multitask. Although people are intrinsically bad at multitasking and even task switching, most of us are quite capable of doing automatic jobs and cognitive work at the same time, for example, walking while talking. The benefit is obvious as long as the two tasks do not interfere. Listening can work with much more kinds of automatic jobs than what reading allows.

Effectiveness: Listening can be more effective than reading in some cases. After all, humans developed hearing comprehension almost 100,000 years earlier than reading. Perhaps this is a timespan large enough for hearing to build a moderate genetic advantage. Scientists did show that the musicality of text can help us understand tough materials.

The voice: Good narrators offer a new dimension of enjoyment in addition to the content. Narration, when done well, can be as beautiful as music. The key is to pick the right narrator, and very good ones do exist.

Go hybrid: You can easily switch between listening and reading of Kindle books using Whispersync for Voice. Check out this fun commercial:

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with Amazon or audible.com, just a happy user.

Talking about Amazon, their availability of audiobooks has been quite good. All the books I recently consumed have audio companions.

The cost: Audiobooks can be less expensive than paper formats if you’re a regular listener. Audible.com subscribers pay $9.56 to $14.95 for an audiobook depending on the subscription. Additionally, you get deep discounts when you combine audiobooks with e-books for Whispersync:

Story time: Finally, kids love stories. Audiobooks can calm your kids and give you a moment of relief without hurting their eyes. I just realized why my parents bought me so many vinyl discs of stories in those years.

Cons

The untouchable: Many arguments against e-books apply to audiobooks, too. Like e-books, audiobooks are intangible. You can’t weigh them, touch them, smell them, or even own them, because they are not atoms pressed on physical medium. John Lennon asserted, “love is touch, touch is love.” How do we love a book if we can never touch it?

The void: Audiobooks may limit our ability to remember. According to Scientific American,

The human brain may… perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape… We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.

E-books handicap our ability to exploit geographical structures, and audiobooks destroy it. Note that this view contradicts a previous point that listening helps comprehension. Indeed, there have been ongoing debates in both academia and industry.

The knob: Navigation is painful with audiobooks. True that you can use bookmarks and jump back and forth. But because of the continuous nature of soundtracks as oppose to discrete pages, it’s challenging to drag that little knob to a desired location on that short progress bar with a giant finger. Plus, how can you recall the timestamp of a paragraph you heard at the gym when you did push-ups and couldn’t or forgot bookmark it? Again, humans rely too much on visual clues to retrieve data.

The speed: Listening may be slower than reading. Fast readers scan through paragraphs vertically rather than staring at individual words or lines. With audiobook you have to hear every, single, word. It is also cumbersome to skip a chunk of content entirely—where the to-be-skipped chunk ends?

The invisible: Audiobooks are unfriendly if not ignorant to visual and out-of-flow elements. There is no way audiobooks can present tables or graphics well. It’s also awkward to handle components that don’t flow naturally with the main text, such as side blocks and citations.

The marker: Finally, with audiobooks, it’s often impossible to highlight text, take notes, or share content.

Use audiobooks efficiently

My recommendations in this section are largely based on the pros and cons discussed above.

The style: Choose books with storytelling styles, as they don’t require frequent back-and-forth navigation or cross referencing—these are traits of good books anyway. Stories also have few visual aids or out-of-flow elements that are essential to the content. Additionally, stories impose less mental burden on the listener than more serious materials, and are thus friendlier to multitasking. I found business books are generally good at telling stories.

The density: Avoid intense books that invite deep thinking such as argumentative essays or scientific publications. You may need frequent slowdowns to comprehend complex ideas and pauses to collect thoughts, check references, or search online for additional information. Using audiobooks would be quite inconvenient. Even e-books may not fit the bill.

Take samples: Always check out voice samples before purchasing. Carefully choose narrators as they greatly affect the experience. Also keep in mind that a narrator may excel in some genres of books but suck on others. To me, the best audiobooks were done by the writer themselves. Authors Simon Sinek and Mary Pope Osborne are great narrators, too.

Go hybrid: To overcome some shortcomings of audiobooks, you can get both e-book and audiobook at a relatively low price. See the words above on Whispersync.

Automatic jobs only: Finally, avoid listening while doing work that require any attention, like driving on a highway with heavy traffic. Otherwise you are distracted away either from the book or from the task. Again, people are not built for multitasking. As pointed out by Daniel Kahneman, many seemingly automatic tasks do require cognitive efforts: you would unconsciously slow down on a stroll when your mind is engaged. I found audiobooks intervened the rhythm of my running, too. Daniel Willingham mentioned:

Multitasking compromises a listener’s attention, unless the task is truly automatic. Jogging on a treadmill would probably be fine, but running on a trail might be too distracting to fully absorb the text.

Mother Nature has wired every one of us similarly but uniquely. Do your experiments and find out what works best for you.