Can You Really “Read” an Audiobook? My experiment with a new medium

So, mid-2022, our company made a big move to the outer ring road, and suddenly, working from the office 5 days a week became the new reality. Boom, one-hour commutes in each direction! At first, it was a major drag. Total boredom city. I tried jamming out to every music app out there, but even that got tired after a couple months.

Fast forward to November, I’m deep in Naval Ravikant’s Almanack(highly recommend, btw), and it hits me: I ain’t exactly been racking up the book count in 2022. Now, audiobooks tried to woo me a few years back, but my poor attention span wouldn’t play ball. So, with my commute stretching on forever and work taking up even more time, I knew I had to do something different. Time to shake things up!

That’s how my audiobook adventure 2.0 began. Buckle up, it’s about to get interesting…

Photo by Shiromani Kant on Unsplash

Re-installed Audible after a long time as an experiment. Tried listening books like Atomic Habits, Ikigai and then I accidently bumped into this wonderful book called “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy. One of the best books. I changed a lot with my daily routine after listening to this book.

After a month or so, I realized Audible may not be sufficient with the 1 book restriction each month (not talking about plus Category).  Was looking for an alternate and ended up with Storytel in January, 2023.

• Audible: More like purchasing the book. Even if you stop subscription, books you purchased are yours forever (INR-199 per month).
• Storytel: More like rental (both audio and ebooks). Will not have access to books, once you stop subscription (INR-249 per month).

Since then I have been listening to atleast 4 books a month so far (I am using both Audible and Storytel). A 9 hour book I could listen to in a week. If its 3 or 6 hours books, I may listen to couple of books in that week.

Barring 3 weeks so far in this year, I have religiously followed this routine and I had a chance to listen to more than 20 books so far in 2023.

I guess I can start calling this as a habit right now.

Based on what I have listened to so far, Some of the books which are must read/listen to (Prioritized)

Personal Development

• The compound effect
• Ikigai
• Hyperfocus
• Zen Mind, Beginners Mind
• Atomic Habits

Building Products : Product Discovery, Product Management, Building, Product Positioning and Product Marketing

• The Mom Test – How to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
• Build – An unorthodox guide to making things worth making
• Radical Candor – Be a kick-ass boss without losing your humanity
• Inspired: How To Create Tech Products Customers Love
• Escaping the build trap
• Obviously Awesome –  how to nail product positioning so customers get it buy it love it
• Loved: how to rethink marketing for tech products
• User Story Mapping: Discover the whole story, build the right product

Spent a whole month, listening to Eliyahu Goldratt and others who followed his writing style on ongoing improvements. Eliyahu Goldratt’s approach is still the best in communicating complex ideas in a very simple form.

• The Goal – A Process of ongoing improvements
• It’s not luck – Sequel to the Goal
• The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

Technology

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

NLP, Analytics, Conversational AI

• Fighting churn with data : Audio book not available. Very expensive India edition. Had to read the eBook.
• Conversational AI: Another good book. Very expensive India edition. Had to read the eBook.

Learnings:

Holy audio-overload! Okay, so switching to audiobooks wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. My brain threw a tantrum at first, refusing to cooperate with these narrated stories. But hey, like any new habit, I just had to stick with it, and eventually, the words started sinking in.

One perk I didn’t anticipate? No more chapter-skipping! With audiobooks, I’m actually absorbing the whole dang book, which feels pretty darn impressive. Of course, not every book was a winner. I started a few that were either way over my head or just, well, boring. Ten audiobooks in, a full hour wasted on each, I had to learn to cut my losses.

And let’s be honest, remembering everything in a book is like trying to catch smoke. I’ve definitely had those “I swear I read this somewhere!” moments, but my brain’s still figuring out the filing system.

Here’s what I’m doing to fight the forgetfulness:

• For the real gems, I grab a physical copy and highlight the good stuff.
• Some books have terrible paper quality or cost a fortune, so I read those on my Kindle or PDFs.
• Storytel has these awesome book summaries for most things. I love revisiting my favorites like that.
• The internet’s a goldmine for summaries too – just check the links in the book names.
• YouTube summaries are a thing for popular books, who knew?

My commute? It went from a 60-minute snoozefest to a 90-minute knowledge buffet. Yeah, it takes longer, but hey, I’m learning stuff!

So yeah, cheers to new habits, unexpected learning adventures, and conquering that pesky memory mountain one book at a time!

Happy Learning!