I’m currently listening to two books and a long form podcast, and when I have down time I tend to be listening to one of these. Watering the garden, having a hot tub, doing the dishes, walking, riding my exercise bike, each of these are done with headphones on.
I rarely read anymore, I listen. Sometimes it’s hard to pay attention, but I actually found reading harder. First of all I’m a painfully slow reader. And secondly, the slow pace makes me more susceptible to being distracted. I would often read a book and then realize I wasn’t absorbing what I was reading. After catching myself being distracted, I could often look back 3-4 paragraphs, or even a couple pages, and not remember reading any of it. While I can be distracted listening, it’s usually only when the task I’m doing requires me to think a bit, like when I’m driving.
The first year that I started listening to books rather than reading them I went from reading 3 books in a year to listening to 26. This year I’ll likely surpass 30. Looking at my Audible stats, I listened to an average of over 3.5 hours a day in July.
Since downloading Audible, I’ve listened for over 2 months, (over 1,400 hours). There is no way that I would have read for a third of that long in the same amount of time!
And that’s just my books, not podcasts, which I listen to for a few hours each month. I don’t watch tv, other than an occasional series with my wife, and I don’t follow sports. I listen. Summer was all about fiction, now I’m getting back into books that I learn from. I find fiction too much of a distraction during the school year. When I listen to books I learn from, I get more value out of reading and out of work. But if I get a good novel recommendation, I occasionally switch up and treat it the same way someone else would treat a movie.
Audio books have transformed they way I consume books… I read them with my ears.
I am with you David. I too have turned to listening, rather than ‘reading’. For me, this stretches beyond audiobooks. I often listen to articles via Pocket or use accessibility tools to listen to eBooks. The strangest thing is whether I call it ‘reading’ or ‘listening’?
I bounce a lot between saying ‘reading’ and ‘listening’… to me, if it was intended as text, and I listen, I’m ok with saying reading, but I don’t read a podcast.