“It’s not an accident that successful people read more books.”
-Seth Godin

I must begin by asking the question: If you could increase your book learning from say, 2, 3 or 10 books per year (or however many you are reading now) to 20 or 30 books per year, would you? If you could distinguish yourself among your peers and become the most well-read, while using less effort, would you do it? If you could easily breeze through books on difficult subjects rather getting frustrated and putting them down, would you do it? Could these things not better your life?

Audiobooks have made my whole life better. No exaggeration! At the age of 25, during a study abroad I began my first audiobook on Audible format. Before that time I had always been an autodidact (self-learner) for many subjects, so books were definitely a part of my life before then. However, I did not have the habit or the know-how to go through endless amounts of books like I do now. Of course, anyone that has gone through a reading-intensive degree program has had to push their reading limits. In my graduate program I had to read, on average, about one full book per week. I’ve been there! Unfortunately, the books I was required to read in graduate school were rarely available on audio, so I found myself at coffee shoppes and 24-hour restaurants (anywhere I could find caffeine) until the early hours of the morning — night after night. Needless to say, this is not a highly-efficient method of acquiring book knowledge. I must admit that despite no longer being a university student I still spend several nights per month reading at Denny’s restaurant until 2am —  and often 5am, where I have my own special table on the other side of the restaurant away from distractions from other customers. You don’t have to do all this, and even if you do, audiobooks will greatly enhance your learning.

As I have posted previously, thanks to audiobooks, I can go through about 30 books per year. A little more than two per month or so (24+ per year) of these are audio format (mostly books from Audible on my iPhone) and the other 6-10 are books in print. Personally, my reading is geared toward acquiring new skill sets and learning (not just entertainment), therefore my audiobooks and print books are almost exclusively non-fiction. (It is my opinion that life is just too short to read fiction; however, I do make very rare exceptions for books that come highly-recommended).

Here are some of the reasons why audiobooks have spawned a reading revolution in the people I know that have embraced them (myself included):

1. You will enhance your education: Your education is everything. Hopefully I don’t have to convince you of that. Read on…
2. You will increase your productivity: Time that was previously non-productive (driving in your car, riding your bike, walking/commuting to work, etc.) is now productive learning time. Anytime I’m in my car, I’m listening. When I’m on airplanes, I’m listening. When I’m riding my bike or running/walking 2-3 times per week around a lake nearby where I live, I’m listening. And when I’m sitting in my living room or relaxing in a coffee shoppe or airport lounge, I’m reading (the old-fashioned way) print books that have not been released yet on Audible.
3. You will breeze through difficult subjects: For all those books that you wanted to read, but they were a bit over your head, you no longer have an excuse. You no longer have to doze off, staring at the same paragraph until you lose all interest. Listening on audio pushes you through the boring parts. If you want to go back and listen to the last few “paragraphs” again, you can just click the “Go back 30 seconds” button if you’re using the Audible app on your smartphone. Or, if you prefer, you can allow the narrator to continue speaking until the audiobook gets more interesting again.
4. You will increase your reading speed: If you’re a slow reader or not a book reader at all, you no longer have an excuse. Get audiobooks. My father was not much of a reader until I gave him his first audiobook on Audio CDs. He was able to listen in his car (which he used for work). He became instantly hooked, and in about a year and a half he went through over 40 books on Audio CD! With audiobooks, you can listen as fast as the speaker can talk. And if you use Audible on a smartphone to listen to books, like I do, you can even adjust the narrator’s reading speed to 0.75x, 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, 2x, 2.5x and 3x, respectively. Personally, I go through most audiobooks at 1.25x. For boring and unimportant parts of audiobooks, I sometimes speed through at 1.5x. Apparently, scientists claim that most people “can understand quickly spoken passages of natural speech” at up to 500 words per minute. But since I’m paying for my books (and thus, my education), I prefer to take time to absorb the content.
5. You will still be able to take notes: I take detailed notes on almost every page of print books and write even more notes on the inside flap. (Example 1, Example 2). Luckily, you don’t have to sacrifice your methodology by switching to audiobooks. If you listen to audiobooks using Audible’s smartphone app, you can take notes at any reference point in the audiobook. That way, you can later scroll through all of your notes, and when you select any of them, the Audible app will resume the audiobook at the exact point in which you made the note.
6. You will pay very little: If you use Audible, you can sign up for Gold and Platinum Memberships to save money. Personally, I pay $14.95 monthly for the Gold Membership, which gives me one credit per month (and buys me almost any audiobook on the website – no matter the price) and 30% off of all audiobooks. Furthermore, the Gold Membership gives me access to great discounts throughout the month, which I receive from Audible’s newsletter, and I use them! In the past there have been a couple of instances in which I needed to catch up on audiobooks that I had already purchased and did not wish to be billed yet for new books. I was happy to learn that Audible had an option to freeze my membership without canceling it for three months. During those three months I was not billed the $14.95 for new credits, but I still had access to the 30% discount if I wished to download any other audiobooks. 

Downsides to audiobooks:
As a believer in full-disclosure, I must mention that there are still, in my opinion, four downsides to audiobooks; so I will identify them:

1. The first is that most people (myself included) tend to remember more when they read the traditional way. Most people tend to be visual learners. C’est la vie. Nonetheless, even if you are a fast reader, being empowered to use all those otherwise mentally non-productive hours of driving in your car, exercising, etc. to enhance your learning by listening to audiobooks makes the adjustment well worth it many times over! There is such a high opportunity cost if you continue to only read books in print. Think of all the books won’t read!
2. The second downside to audiobooks is that the references/sources are often not given. When recording, the narrator reads the print version of the book as if no reference was even given (unless the author included the reference into wording in the paragraph). Honestly, as much as I love audiobooks, this seems like plagiarism to me, and in my opinion, books on Audio CD format should include a .docx or .pdf file with references on one of the CDs, and Audible/iTunes books should have such a file available for download as well. But even with this hurdle, I have still been able to find references when I need them by going to http://books.google.com and locating the book I am listening to on the Google Books database then searching for three or four keywords that were mentioned in the audiobook around the time of the needed reference. If I get the keywords right (spacing and everything), Google Books brings me right to the page that I was listening to right on my web browser. I find the footnote number and chapter then refer to the book’s References section in the last few pages, and there’s my reference. Similarly, Amazon.com’s Look Inside feature allows you to browse through the books in a similar way. Therefore you can also look through the book’s references using this website.
3. The third downside to audiobooks, in my opinion, is that audiobooks do not always come with all the images containing supporting graphics, charts, etc. that traditional books do. This is annoying — no doubt. There are a few ways to find these images when you need them. If you are listening to an audiobook on Audio CDs, sometimes the first CD will contain images; just look at the CD case/box to find out. If your audiobook is on Audible, thankfully, all or most of the images are often available on the Audible.com website for download in .pdf format (but not always, unfortunately). When they are available I always download the .pdf files and save them onto my iPhone. If I want to refer to them while listening to the audiobook, I can open the .pdf from the Documents app (made by SavySoda™ and available on iTunes). And of course, alternatively, you can still refer to Google Images or Amazon’s Look Inside feature to scan through books to find the image.

Maximizing your learning experience:
I am able to maximize my learning experience by also purchasing many of the books that I listen to on audio in print. If the book covers material that is particularly important to my long-term goals, then I take notes in the print book after I’ve identified something from the audiobook that I want to highlight. This is a perfect solution to the previous four aforementioned “downsides to audiobooks.” With this technique these “downsides” are no longer downsides at all.

Next, in order to really immerse the book material into my long-term memory I almost always search YouTube for presentations by the author on the book’s topic. These days when an author goes on book tour and presents on the book topic, fortunately, those presentations usually make it YouTube. Often they appear as TED Talks. Listening to a presentation by the author is like getting all the best highlights of the book presented in a well-organized outline form. It’s beautiful.

And lastly, I search for documentaries on the book topic. As documentaries are audiovisual, watching them helps commit the content to long-term memory and provides depth since the documentaries usually present the content differently than the book, so you think about the information from different perspectives.

With listening to audiobooks, taking notes on the print versions of the book, watching presentations given by the authors and then watching documentaries on the subject you get a very well-rounded education indeed. This might possibly seem like a lot of work. But to me, this way of doing things is both easier and more efficient than trying to read cover-to-cover book after book. The traditional method of reading alone is only a crutch for most people because it limits their learning speed to their reading speed; that is, they read slowly so they learn slowly as a result. Thanks to audiobooks and the techniques I’ve mentioned here, a slow reader like me can go through about 30 books a year – and not by merely skimming books then claiming I “read” them like many people do. With audiobooks and the techniques I’ve explained in this article, I really do go through the books cover-to-cover and then some!

Conclusion:
As you see from the previous section, the pros far outweigh the cons (in my opinion), and the cons still have easy workarounds. So go to Audible.com and look for that book that you always wanted to read and never did. Get going. Become more well-read than all of your peers. Kick ass; take names. Enjoy your enlightened new life.

See also:
How to acquire fluency in a foreign language as an adult