I love listening to audiobooks at 1.5x-2x speed while I'm walking outside. I can get through 100 books a year this way. Of course I don't take notes or think deeply about the content. Who needs that? In fact, I have no idea which books I've read this year! Or last year! All I want is cross stuff off my vanity to-do list consisting of books collected from HN and get a feeling of accomplishment. And I can tell others about it! 100 books a year! /s
Don't forget that you have two ears, why not listen to two books simultaneously? Left ear can have personal life hack books and right ear can have business books
But you know what I like more than materialistic things? Knowledge. In fact, I’m a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold two thousand new books that I bought. It’s like the billionaire Warren Buffett says, “the more you learn, the more you earn.”
For a second I wasn't sure if you were sarcastic or not. Apparently the former.
Audiobooks even when sped up are still a lot slower than reading. You wouldn't ridicule someone for reading fast, would you. Reading fast is usually seen as an advantage and a sign of reading maturity.
But if you listen to a lot of audiobooks you easily learn to do it faster than normal speaking speed. I'm told that blind people, can comfortably handle 4x times normal speed.
I thinking reading fast is a sign of immaturity. When I was a teen I swallowed books whole. I absorbed sentences in a glance. But as I've got older I've slowed down. I re-read more. I choose more carefully. I get deeper into things. Fast reading is for skimming over the surface of things. Which is fine but definitely not a sign of maturity.
I agree generally, but it depends what you're reading. There are many books that "could have been an article" -- these might not be worth reading slowly.
> You wouldn't ridicule someone for reading fast, would you.
I might well, if it were evident they prioritized speed of completion over comprehension and retention of the content, and if they also insisted against all intuition and much evidence that speed of completion were the only figure of merit.
I love listening to audiobooks at 0.5x speed to really comprehend what I'm listening to. The people who listen at 1x speed are just there for the experience of listening to something and not to get anything from the book. /s
I have found that listening to audiobooks at 1.35X speed is the "best value" speed. It shortens the amount of time wasted on silence and is still comprehensible. Going any faster than that leads to some incomprehension and strange audio distortions.
I find that reading rather than listening to an audiobook is the superior form of consumption for knowledge retention however.
I assume this will be different for each individual.
Now now, you're forgetting the crucial part where you post everywhere about how you've listened to <book recommended by your favorite tech influencer, who hasn't read it himself> and that it was a life changing experience.
You couldn't quote a single line from it and it's most likely some vapid bullshit in that book anyways, but that makes you _better_ than those non readers.
People read for different reasons. Some people hope to "take notes and think deeply" about a topic. Some people read for fun. Others hope to gain a broad overview of a subject but aren't hoping to remember everything they read. What's wrong with listening to an audio-book on high speed if you are reading for one of the latter two reasons?
I've known a dude who taught at university on the side, besides working on logistics of all things, he said he had a mild form of dyslexia, so he taught himself to read books, by reading each page, on each side at the same time, as some form of compensation. I don't know if I could believe it, but there's document cases of this, and his retention and speed was crazy fast. Could be that he just taught himself to glance and chunk structures really fast, which is what I do, if I try to read fast without regard for safety or pleasure.
One thing you learn from reading many books, even at 2x, is that many people prefer lots of things differently, and that that works well for them. If listening at 2x is not your thing, I suggest you find another way to learn that lesson. Based on your comment, you still have to learn that.
"This tool won’t be appropriate for all audiobook listeners. For many, the silences matter, and removing them would degrade the quality of the book. For many, listening at 2.5x would also degrade the quality of the book. So use this tool with caution."
It's nice that this was also brought up. At least for me, even though I don't listen to audiobooks, it's too easy to become too "performance-oriented" when reading something. Meaning that ticking the box "achievement unlocked, read another book" becomes more important than what you really get out of the book. Did you now retain as much information as possible? Did you savor the work of art or just gulp it down? Ironically, if you don't use tools like these carefully, listening to books may end up being even a bigger waste of time.
I would say that to have read a text is not the goal, it's a mere implementation detail. The goal is to understand ideas which the text tries to convey.
Some texts, and usual human speech, are low-density, high-redundancy. If you can easily understand the ideas they carry, you can listen at a really high speed and still don't miss anything, and later be able to adequately recall the ideas.
Some texts are either higher-density, or talk about concepts novel enough for the listener, and it takes some time to unpack the ideas and commit them to memory. Such texts cannot be read too fast, and sometimes require going back a sentence, or a paragraph, and re-reading.
An ideal (from the efficiency standpoint) audio book device would have a speed dial to control the level of adaptive compression, like described by the linked page. It would also have controls to jump back a sentence and replay it slower.
But such device is unlikely, because I suppose that the main audience of audio books is commuting drivers, who need to keep their hands on the wheel, and their eyes on the road, so they can't properly read.
And if course I suppose that the speedup and compression are barely applicable, or need a different approach, to books read with some artistic expression (that us, most fiction worth reading).
So. Assuming we are talking about non fiction. Why would you read a book that you don't really expect to learn anything new from?
Further, your supposed use case of audio books is when you're driving, when most of your attention should be spent... Driving.
As for fiction, efficiency totally misses the point. Efficiency isn't reading Harry potter as fast as possible. Efficiency is not reading it at all.
My most charitable interpretation is that we just have different aims when it comes to consuming literature, but that still leads back to the ops point that this is basically the gamification of book reading.
> Why would you read a book that you don't really expect to learn anything new from?
Entertainment! A sufficiently wrongheaded idea advanced at length and with a measure of braggadocio can be funny as anything. Startup-culture biens-pensants are often good for this, I find.
That said, in the general case you're not wrong, and it should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Goodhart's law that the gamification of reading produces perverse outcomes.
I wish we just didn't write low-density, high-redundancy non-fiction anymore. Especially books written in the "self-help" style where about 1% is the core message, and 99% are illustrations, examples, author's opinions, and similar.
That 99% is very easy to find online in the age of information deluge, it's probably where the author sourced it. Before the 00s, this content in a book would have been helpful. But these days, it makes sense that most people want to skip it or 2.5x it.
I used to carry a reporter notebook and take notes all the time I was listening to audio books. This made it very obvious that there's usually not a lot of information to extract from business books, leadership books, or any other kind of "coaching" books. Now I try to buy the summary variant of these books. Because ultimately, I was making my own summaries in a very time-wasteful way.
To make your own summaries you need to understand and think about the source material. I get more value from reading the book and analyzing it rather than glancing at the too-long-didn't-read version of notes somebody else wrote.
For example, the entire Checklist Manifesto book can be distilled to one sentence: break down crucial procedures into checklists and follow them. That's the core message. The 1%. On its own it means nothing to me. I can re-read it hundreds of times and it won't change my life. I'll recognize it but I won't understand it.
I need time to process my thoughts. Let the ideas marinate in my brain so to speak. I won't get much out of a book if I read it cover to cover in one sitting either.
My way to study a subject is to read not just one book, but 2 or 3 more from different authors. This way I can compare their opinions, find common things, see where they disagree, find the answers to questions I wrote down during my first read. Then I can take those ideas and make them my own.
Yes, it takes time. There's no shortcuts when I want to understand something.
As for the 99% filler content - I don't have to read it. When I read I ask myself "What's the goal of this section? What does the author try to achieve?". Often, I find a good reason. If not, I'll skip it. I can always return to it later. I have that option. I can't do that with summaries because they are lossy compression. I can't get more out of them because it's not there.
Sure, I can do my own research and look for it on the internet or interview relevant people. But at this point, I might as well write my own book.
>audiobooks, it's too easy to become too "performance-oriented" when reading something. Meaning that ticking the box "achievement unlocked, read another book" becomes more important than what you really get out of the book. Did you now retain as much information as possible?
You're expressing a common skepticism of 2x+ speedup but it misunderstands why people do it. It actually improves the presentation to 200+ wpm so the brain is more receptive to learning. The slower ~100 wpm (i.e. 1x speed) acted as a barrier to learning. I tried to explain the 2x+ advantage previously and how blind people had utilized this technique years before the general public did:
The motivations for speedup mostly applies to non-fiction audiobooks. For fiction, you may deliberately leave it at 1x because you want the deliberate pacing of the voice acting in addition to the info conveyed by the bare text.
Audio playback speed adjustment is just a tool. If you're a musician trying to learn a complicated guitar lick or drum fill, slow the music down to 0.5x or even 0.25x if that helps unlock it. If you're listening to Lord of the Rings, then playing it at 1x seems very reasonable. If you're listening to a speaker discussing inflation for an hour but keep tuning out because he talks too slow, speed him up to 4x if you have to so the information is presented at the higher speed your that brain prefers receiving it.
EDIT to replies to clarify "The slower ~100 wpm (i.e. 1x speed) acted as a barrier to learning."
This statement in isolation looks like an absolute science claim that 1x causes "zero learning" but of course that wasn't what I was saying. The context is "barrier to _optimal_ learning" for that particular reader. If 1x is too slow and makes some readers not stay mentally engaged, or abandon audiobooks, or leave podcasts/lectures in the queue and never listen to them, that's the "barrier to learning" that I'm trying to convey.
Likewise, if one needs to slow it down to 1/2 speed to comprehend difficult-to-parse text, that also meant 1x was too fast and also a barrier to optimal learning.
> The slower ~100 wpm (i.e. 1x speed) acted as a barrier to learning.
Unless there is a lot of good evidence, I am skeptical of this claim
Human children are exposed verbally to 1x human speech. Do we really think that making teachers talk faster will improve learning and retention?
Also, according to linguistics, I believe pretty much human languages transmit close to the same bit rate (some languages have longer more descriptive words, some have shorter words, but by and large they average out).
Throughout our evolution, we have been exposed to 1x speech.
My guess would be that are brains don’t have a learning block to 1x speech.
It maybe doesn't come naturally to most people to be able to take in information from speech at high speeds, but it is definitely possible to learn. I am blind, and use a screen reader. My screen reader's voice is many times faster than normal human speech. (I don't know exactly how much faster, but most people can't understand a word of it.) I also listen to non-fiction podcasts and books at 1.5-2x speed, although I almost always listen to fiction at normal speed unless the reader is painfully slow.
If you already have 'ffmpeg' (which he uses to convert the audio to .wav), then you could keep going and use this for most all the process.
Looking at the related audio filters (i.e., -filter:audio, or -filter:a, or -af):
- to remove silence : -af silenceremove=1:0:-50dB:detection=peak
- to shorten duration : -af rubberband=tempo=4
- if you wanted to quickly/easily normailze the audio : -af loudnorm
This leads to:
ffmpeg -i happy_book.mp3 -af loudnorm -af silenceremove=1:0:-50dB:detection=peak -af rubberband=tempo=4 happy_book_out.mp4
You could roll all those options into one filter command, but leaving like this for newer-users to digest.
I also tend to re-encode using libfdk (though you need to be sure that your ffmpeg is compiled with this enabled) for a better mp4 (or .m4a or .m4b), so :
ffmpeg -i happy_book.mp3 -af loudnorm -af silenceremove=1:0:-50dB:detection=peak -af rubberband=tempo=4 -c:a libfdk_aac happy_book_out.m4a
I feel the same way about any media: podcasts, TV, movies, etc.
The creator put in a lot of time and effort, so to not give it your full attention is a complete disservice. When I watch something, I want to hear every line and not miss any dialogue. When I read something, I want to absorb every sentence.
Can't wait to hear someone critiquing our "consumption-obsessed society" in an Amazon review of an economics audiobook they listened to at 6x speed on their morning commute.
> What's the point of listening to 3 books per day? You need time to digest the ideas in a book.
Agreed, but sometimes there's value in having broad exposure ASAP.
e.g. learning what tools/techniques are available in a given discipline
e.g. learning enough jargon to Google for deeper exposure
This can be helpful in cross-disciplinary contexts. Perhaps you don't need to truly understand Statistics, for instance, but you're working on a problem in which you've binned a matrix of values into deck-of-card-like suits and you want to evaluate how "good" each choice was within its local context. It would help to know terms like "categorical variables" and "goodness of fit".
Meanwhile, I am slowing down the pace of my life a little bit every day. I plan to build a little cabin in the woods, taking my time, enjoying the peace and tranquility of the forest. I listen to podcasts and audiobooks, yes, but I do it slow. I do not want to rush anymore. Life is too short to rush.
I usually listen to audio books at between 1.2 and 1.4 times speed. This started when I was listening to Madeleine Albright's "Fascism: a warning" and I found her narration speed to be uncomfortably slow. So I figured I'd try out the speed settings in Audible. I had tried them before, but they sounded really bad. Now they sound pretty OK unless there is background music.
After that I have been experimenting a bit with speed settings and what feels comfortable really depends on the narrator. It isn't just how fast or slow they narrate, but also the cadence and the material they are reading. Some material requires some time for processing and thinking while listening. I end up adjusting the speed for every book I listen to and it is rare that I go any faster than 1.4.
Fastbook was a bit uncomfortable to listen to. It totally kills the rhythm of how someone speaks. However it does a surprisingly good job of not making it sound too bad. It is unpleasant to listen to, but it isn't immediately obvious why. So I'd call that perhaps a partial win?
I've tried to gradually up the narration speed, but even if I can understand what people are saying at 2x, it doesn't leave much room for thinking about what they are saying before they are on to the next idea. There is no time for processing. I noticed that I'd pause books to get some time to think - which is clumsy and inefficient.
For video courses I often vary the speed between 1x and 2x speed. Some instructors have a terrible teaching style where their narration is peppered with irrelevant and annoying asides. For instance when they take time to explain something that ought to be obvious and which isn't directly related to the material. Then again for video courses, I make much more use of pausing, speed adjustment, I go back to play things again, stop to think etc.
I don't think this obsession with very high speed is useful. What is useful is to adapt the speed to where it feels comfortable and where you can absorb what is being said.
I listen on 1.2x on Spotify and 1.3x on Audible (has more fine grained control) and it just sounds normal after a little while. I tried 1.5x and it was tough to follow.
My wife thinks I'm insane anytime she hears the audio. It's interesting that there seems to be some training component to ramping up speed.
As someone who listens to most audio books at between 1.5x and 2x I'm interested to try this. Although I think it will be problematic for me.
I would like the silence between words removed. But the silences betweens higher level structural blocks are necessary. You need a pause between chapters to signal the change of topic. Or depending on the books structure, sometimes between paragraphs too, when they indicate a switch of topic/perspective/thread.
One of my annoyances with some narrators (directors?) is that the gap between sentences and chapters is equal length, which often makes a confusing jump of context. I like it when each new chapter is announced as it comes.
I like how this is different from many other tools, as it can also leave the pauses untouched while speeding up the speaking. For me, listening at something above >2x is often hard, as it gets all mashed together. Most tools that speed up "dynamically", does so by removing the silent parts. But I need those, those are the ones telling me when one word ends and the other one begins. So I'd like more tools to do the opposite: increase the speed of the words, but keep the pauses between words so my brain registers the start/end.
Nice open source project, but ironically I feel that it would take too much of my time preparing shortened audio books.
My wife and I have both been family plan members of Audible for about 10 years and when you include their free audio book Plus Catalog, we have probably well over 1000 shared books.
I sometimes speed up listing by up to 1.5 times faster for books that I like well enough to finish, but not 100% liking. For some books I really like, I may end up listening to them two or more times - so it is not all about saving time. Yesterday, I was 3 hours into a 12 hour book and I was not loving it but wanted to enjoy the ending so I skipped forward to just the last two hours.
Even though I am mostly retired, I find there is not time enough for much of what I would like to do. My personal best strategy for getting time back is learning how to enjoy just the first few episodes of streaming video series, and then stopping unless I really love the series.
One last thing on the subject of using time effectively: I find that the recall from reading some books I really loved is far from perfect. My wife and I subscribe to the Blinkist service, and I find a really good use of time is to occasionally read (or listen) to a 15 minute summary of a previously read book and then spend another 5 minutes thinking about the book.
I got into the trap of wanting to read more , hence faster, thinking I wold gain more knowledge that way.
After a couple of years I realized :
- most modern books just don't worth the time spent reading them : a simple summary would do and often doesn't bring anything new anyway
- the rare books worth reading require time to be processed (for essays) or to get immersed (for novels).
So such apps solve a false dichotomy, in my opinion. But it can be useful as an "improved podcasts" maker.
For the audiobooks I was making, I used this app which is great and highly customizable (speed, pauses time, export in multiple formats, cut into chunks, ...) : balabolka[1]
- transcribe
- automunge that transcription
- remove "ah", "um" etc
- remove repeated phrases [0]
- optionally summarize [1]
- stitch the surviving segments back into continuous audio
- match words-per-minute between the speakers [2]
- do all the "smartspeed" stuff that Fastbook and Overcast.app do
[0] Notable example: Scott Galloway of The Pivot adopted the affection of repeating phrases for emphasis. Drives me batty.
[1] No shade, because I understand it's a chat and not scripted, but Accidental Tech Podcast could benefit from summarization. I love that they're talking stuff out. But sometimes I just want the conclusions.
[2] Like when Lex Fridman interviews someone who talks faster than him.
I routinely watch videos and listen to audiobooks at 2.75x, that's somehow the magic number for me. I can only do it with the headphones (not speakers) and I only lose a negligible number of words.
I'm not planning to stop but I have noticed that after a few years of doing this, my speech has gotten faster. This is not good because I feel sometimes I don't let people process what I say and sometimes I make them feel rushed. I suppose fast listening is subconsciously training me to speak faster
Another interesting observation is that I often don't know what the theme musics of my favorite YouTube channels sound like because they sound very different at a faster speed. When I accidentally hear them at normal speed I think to myself that they actually sound a lot nicer than what I'm used to.
Semi-related, check out Snipd for podcasts. As a former 2x podcast & audible listener, I prefer there style of consumption.
I can still listen at a reasonable 1.5x (or faster if you wish).
They have transcriptions you can use to read along or use to create notes.
For popular podcasts you can review a list of snippets people saved.
It's easy to share your snippets with friends, note & storage apps.
I would love to see a version of this for books and audio books. I do know that you can buy both the written & audio books & then use one of many review or summary websites to compare & see what other people have taken from the book. But it would nice to see this all in one app. For podcasts, Snipd has set the bar for the time being.
This may well be beyond the etiquette of HN but listening to podcasts/YT/audiobooks on fast speeds and omitting silence breaks is really stupid. Slow frying your brain to save 5 minutes here and there doesn’t make you smarter.
I don't understand this, especially with podcasts - it's not frying anyone's brain to listen to 2x speed. I listen to podcasts at 2x because I (and everyone else) can hear and understand way faster than people normally speak. The only difference between 1x and 2x speed is that I find the people sound more intelligent and engaged. They sound passionate and focused at that speed, that's really the biggest difference.
If I could not speed up podcasts, I would not listen to them at all. As a matter fact, before I had access to a podcast player with this feature up I did not listen to them at all.
There’s way too much fluff, even in a good technical podcast (these actually seem to be the ones that neglect all editing, so many speakers are half ‘ums’ or long pauses while they come up with what to say next) and of course the “fun” podcasts are mostly made of fluff and are largely unlistenable at below 2x
I use audible quite a lot, and I like the 1.2x-1.4x range because I feel like sometimes they slow down the original audio and it just doesn't feel... real, but it depends entirely on the books. One time I tried getting it up, I just wasn't sure what was going on and was lost. Sure, after a couple of minutes the brain kind of adapted and I was hearing it but I wasn't actually listening.
I feel like the pursue for speed/efficiency kills the time our brain needs to actually absorb and digest what it just listened. If after a week you don't remember anything, what was the point?
Cool, I like the idea and I actually use this feature a lot in Google Podcasts.
However, I believe there is a way to do this with a single ffmpeg command. I remember watching lecture videos with higher speeds wondering about the huge amount of silence that made it still pretty annoying. I didn’t find anything simple to trim silence on audio and video combined and finally only listened to the audio with trimmed silence using ffmpeg.
I use the app Pocket Cast and listen to podcasts in sped up form.
Current stats:
* Listened for 27 days 9 hours,
* Manual Skipping: Saved 17 hours,
* Increased speed: Saved 31 days 21 hours,
* Auto trim silence: Saved 6 days 14 hours
I was unconvinced until I listened to the demos at the bottom. I might have to test this with the next book I listen to, seems like it might make the listening experience better too.
I'm one of those people who is obsessed with viewing or listening to content more quickly. I've managed to push to 2.8x on video and 3-3.5x on audio depending on content.
I am looking for a podcast application that allows me to customize the voice pitch to eliminate vocal fry. Although many outstanding podcasts are American, it appears that most of them are presented by hosts who use this particular register. I've attempted to ignore or get used to it, but it remains an issue for me.
Additionally, I struggle with hosts who have a habit of ending every sentence with an upward inflection, which I find quite annoying.
I often listen to talks at faster speeds, but there's a trick to it: ramp the speed.
Start at 1x, then increment the speed slowly over a bit of time giving your brain time to adjust. You can easily get to 3x speed by "ramping" the speed over a period of time.
Is there any audio book reader that supports such speed ramping? In an automatic way?
The silence removal and speed adjustment should be an integral part of audio content consumption, available in any application, be it a podcast app or a watching YouTube in a browser. The UX matters, if I can't speed up a slow source or it takes too much effort, I'll go listen to something else.
I do use the similar feature in the Overcast Podcast Player for most podcasts where the story telling is not important but for audio books, I’m more about the experience of the book. I could just read it but an audiobook is more enveloping.
Just to add to the chorus: some books need to be slowed down to follow. I find books like Paradise Lost, Blood Meridian, or even Sherlock Holmes are almost impossible to follow at normal speed.
yeah, I was wondering the same. I just saw in another thread somewhere "how to get youtube videos summary with AI". This "hurry up" atmosphere that we're pushing towards ourselves will eat us in form of anxiety and increasing stupidness
I listen on audio books between 100-300% speed, depending on the reader, topic and my mood. For majority of books, I'd go crazy if I was stuck to 100% speed.
"Aaron Mayer aims to listen to 100 audiobooks in a single month. He intends to listen to these audiobooks at 2x - 3x speed"
I listen to more than 1000 audiobooks per week at 600x speed.
And I have a lot of free time left.
And I like this sound "bzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhazzzzzzz".
the embedded comments section in the blogpost seems to lead directly to a discord channel. thats a pretty unique comment system! wonder how effective it has been for the author.
Here's a video of blind person programming with Visual Studio using a screen reader. It reads so fast the words come out to me like mumbles or almost a buzzing sound
I have my screen reader faster than that video most of the time, and I know some other blind people who can understand it much faster. If you have an iPhone or iPad, you can try the robotic sounding voice used in the video, which is also the one I use with my screen reader. It is called eloquence. I can understand voiceover with eloquence at 85%, but have my phone set to 75% most of the time so that I can hear it in a noisy environment.
