Reading + Listening
I listen to audiobooks of tomes I won’t be notating extensively. (Boyd said that if you didn’t write more than what was on the page in the margins, you weren’t reading closely enough.) I listen at 2x speed, perhaps the coolest feature on my aging iPod. I can kill a book a week on top of what I’m reading – while walking, showering, heading to bed, playing video games. Otherwise each of these things bores me to no end.
But sometimes, as when listening to this biography of Marx, I find myself wanting to annotate. Which means I have to scrounge up a copy of the book (stupid that a PDF does not come with every audiobook), find the right page, then mark it up. Or just write notes in a separate (or physical) document, that will forever remain untethered from the text itself.
A cool trend on the iPad is that the audio is paired with the text. You can read along but also zone out and listen. It seems to be primarily geared towards children’s books, but I’d use this now. Pause and markup. Pick up listening from wherever the text is. Export notes.
We’re not there yet on the voice software that tries to read text locally on an ad-hoc basis, or even Siri. The inflections are jarring. When you put out a book, just produce audiobooks using actors trying to make it. Podcast-ify the whole thing. At home, with a mic and a voice for radio, for a couple hundred bucks.
A side note: I read a lot as a kid. Lots. My vocabulary – the words I knew and understood within and outside of context – was huge. I had no idea how to pronounce them. Still, once in a while, I’ll find myself stumbling over a word, equally surprising myself and whoever I’m having a conversation with. That’s something read-along books will cure for future generations. And that’s very cool.
-Shlok
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