I love to read the books, but life is short. As describe similar discussion here before, if I can read 30 books a month, I would be able to read around 360 books a year, therefore I may be able to read only about 3000 books before I turn 40, including rereading books. I have to work and will have family, children. My life is going to be busy, it will be much harder to save the enough time to read books.
However, the one of recent technological innovations helps a lot, as you know it is called “The audio books”. The benefit of reading audio books are following.
1. We can listen the book with doing something else (e.g. driving, cleaning, walking and so on)
2. We can build listening skill.
3. I believe, from my experience, the audio books work on our emotion, while the physical books work on our logical thinking.
4. Since you listen the book, you know how these words are pronounced, so you can easily talk about the book with your friends.
But also, the audio book has disadvantages, such as,
1. Sometime listening is interrupted by our random thinking. So that, listening audio books is not suit for reading the book first time. You may lost the some part of book when you are thinking different things, which happen almost unconsciously, like “What is today’s dinner?”
2. It is said that comfortable listening is around 160 wpm, so about 10000 word an hour. Normally, the number of words written in the book is around 40000 to 300000. So that we need 4 hours to finish shortest book, sometime 30 hours is needed to finish a long ones.
I am listening faster than normal speed like 2X normal speed, if I can focus on listening I use 3X mode. The audible apps in my smartphone has such function fortunately. Firstly, I thought listening faster speed is hard, but finally I got used to.
You know life is short, I estimated how many hours I spend listening books for a month. I am listening the book around 50 hours a month, which means I do sacrifice my time for listening music for 50 hours. I do listen music, I love music, I play music. But, I chose to listen the books, most of my niche time. Yes, I know time is invaluable.