1\\ The closest thing to a real life superpower is devouring audiobooks

Yet most people don't do it

This is a thread of "Bad Reasons To Avoid Audiobooks"

Plus some ninja tricks for getting the most out of them

2\\ "I prefer old fashioned reading, physical paper, etc..."

So do I. But audiobooks can be consumed at times and places that books are unavailable

Gym, car, walking, waiting, etc.

It's not "or audiobooks", it's "and audiobooks"

3\\ "My retention is worse when I listen"

Again, so what?

It's not about replacing traditional reading, but about *adding* something productive during unproductive times

Half the retention with 10x the quantity is a huge win

4\\ "The voices sound funny"

Trust me, give it a day. Your brain is smart. After a few hours of practice, you won't notice even the worst robot voices

5\\ Ok, now let's talk about how to get the most out of audiobooks:

-Taper up to 3x speed. It'll be hard at first, but you've learned many difficult things in life. After a few weeks, 3x will feel normal

For technical stuff, you may have to go back down to ~2x speed

6\\ Get a good blue tooth headset (the kind that sits around your neck). When you don't have to fuss with wires and when you can pause with the touch of a button, you can start filling every unoccupied moment of your day with reading

7\\ http://Audible.com  has perhaps 2-3 years of good non-fiction (mostly history and biography) at 3x speed. Sort non-fiction by length and read all the longest stuff. It's a crude but reliable proxy for quality

8\\ The real mother lode is http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ 

If piracy makes you feel guilty, order a used physical copy on Amazon too

Download VoiceDream to read the pdfs and epubs

VoiceDream works better for iOS and is worth leaving Android for

9\\ You'll come to prefer VoiceDream because unlike with Audible, you can take screenshots of the text, which makes it easy to keep notes, upload a passage to Twitter for discussion, etc.

10\\ Gamify it by keeping a list of titles. Cheesy and vain, but over time it becomes a great resource for structured study and discussion https://twitter.com/ElonBachman/status/1213821120660590592?s=20

11\\ Reduce search costs by starting with some big "chunks":

All the US prez bios

The entire Will Durant series

Any non-fiction with a Pulitzer (yes, there are some duds)

If you read something good, read all the author's books

Etc.

12\\ Unless you have a specific reason to read it, avoid anything written in the last five years

Time is a wonderful filter to determine what was good, and what was merely marketed well

You'll miss some gems, but you'll miss 10x more puff pieces from faddish academics

13\\ Think long and hard about why you read fiction

I was a lit major, so I get it

But let it be the salt, not the steak

Learning true things is usually more rewarding than learning untrue things, as beautifully as they may be packaged

14\\ You should be able to crank through 100-110 audiobooks a year, while almost never "making time to read"

All the listening is while walking, lifting, cooking, etc.