I find myself avoiding audiobooks of nonfiction content for fear of not being able to engage deeply (reread, flip back and forth, check footnotes, highlight, annotate, etc).<p>Are there any methods or tools to help effectively engage with audio content?<p>(Note: I think all bets are off for books with charts and equations - you have to go digital/paper book in that case. I am asking more about general nonfiction.)
I listen to mostly non fiction audio books during my commute.<p>If I find a key point that I want to save, I write it down when I arrive.<p>If I find there is a good amount of knowledge that I simply cannot recall, I look for a short summary of the book in paper form.<p>If there is no summary, I will look for a good used copy in paper form.
I’ve noticed general nonfiction books tend to be <i>way</i> longer than they need to be. I’m not the first to make this observation, and won’t be the last. Most (including from often recommended authors, like Cal Newport[1]) have a single core idea stretched to fill a book. If you can find a talk by the author on the topic, it will be a better use of your time.<p>But on to some practical tips. Every person is different and without knowing you personally some of these might miss the mark, but I’ll give them as they apply to me; hopefully some will be useful to you.<p>You <i>will</i> forget most of what you read, including entire books you enjoyed and left an impression on you, but the core ideas will stay. A good nonfiction book has the potential to update your mental model of the world. That stays with you even after you forget all the individual arguments that provoked the change. In sum, don’t fret about “engaging deeply” and making annotations you will never read. Consume the book. If you found it has potential to be relevant in your life, make a note of it and come back to it at a later point in life. You might find some of the ideas that were novel to you when you first read it now feel like common sense and are part of your personality. That book has done its job. You may tag it again for future reconsumption, or discard it.<p>Keep a digital copy of the book in your phone while you listen to the audiobook. If there is an idea you really want to save for later, pause the audiobook and search the written version for a string of three or four words you just heard. An exact short phrase is typically enough to find the right spot. Annotate it there.<p>Listen at over 1x speed. The exact speed will depend on both your practice and the book. I get distracted by other thoughts both when I read and when I listen, but when I listen I can tell the software to make it more challenging. The trick is to set the audiobook playback speed slow enough that you can still comprehend it, but fast enough that it takes effort to do so. That will leave no space for stray thoughts, increasing the attention you give the content.<p>Programming books aren’t a good fit for audio, so they don’t tend to be produced as audiobooks, but there is still value in audiobooks with charts and graphs. Those tend to bundle a PDF with the required images and the narrator will tell you where to look. Even so you may not need to check, as what matters in a graph aren’t the lines, but the conclusions. If you trust the author’s honesty and competence, you may eschew looking at the pictures and accept their interpretation of the data.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal_Newport" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal_Newport</a>