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How I Read Over 40 books Last Year and Never Turned A Page
By Thom | March 3, 2008
Yes, that’s correct, I read over 40 books last year and never had a late fee, never went to Barnes and Noble or bought any books (other than textbooks) from Half.com. How did I do it? Well, I’m an audio learning junkie, e.g. I have over 21 gigs of audio content on my external hard drive. I listen to books on tape, cd, or mp3 – with the latter being my favorite. Yeah, you can laugh, that’s alright with me, but audio learning has really opened my eyes up to whole new worlds. The average American adult drives over 12,000 miles a year in their car. If you do the math, that is the same amount of time that would be spent in a 3-credit college course (well, if you actually went to class). Drive more than 12,000 miles? It’s like free tuition!
My audio learning odyssey started when I was young when my family would take long car vacations. My father would rent books on tape from the library and he would listen to them. I hated it! I would have rather listened to music on the radio and sung along (maybe that’s why he did it?). I never really picked up on the audio book habit until I was a freshman in college. I found that I would be spending a lot of time running outside or driving home and it was getting awful boring. So to prevent me falling asleep, I rented a couple audio books from the library. The summers between my freshman and sophomore year I had several jobs that required me to do at least 40 minutes of driving a day to get to work. Naturally, I got bored with listening to early-morning DJ’s and started exclusively listening to audio books. I found that I could almost read a book a week!
During my Junior year of college I started rowing a lot, and that was dead boring – nothing but staring at a little screen with numbers that slowly moved. So I started loading up my iPod with audio books and could easily read a book every two weeks.
The three keys that I found were very helpful in feeding this habit were:
1. Having an iPod – portable music, very easy to throw in your headphones during a lone walk to class, or during your workout session. Throw it in your bag even if you don’t think that you’ll have time to listen, you may find a couple minutes here and there.
2. Having an MP3 compatible stereo or input in your car – this allows me to either burn rewritable cd’s that I always keep in the stereo, or to plug in my iPod and listen away – they are cheap to buy and cheap to install.
3. Good (read: free) content – Essential! I find that I am better at listening to fiction when I’m working out and nonfiction elsewhere. You will have to experiment and find out what work best for you! If you hate the book that you’re reading, ditch it and find something else.
Most of the stuff that I listen to comes my way from sites like LearnOutLoud.com, where I simply subscribed to there email list and they send free audio books each week to my inbox. Other times, I find some good stuff at the library or through other online sources. Recently I’ve been borrowing audio books from others and sharing mine. There are quite a few good books in the public domain, so look around.
A quick list good sites for free content are:
LearnOutLoud.com – they have a great email subscription including “Free Audio Friday,” along with “Monday Morning Motivation”
Audible.com – I haven’t used these guys before, but I hear (no pun intended) good things – you pick a plan, you download your music and listen
LibriVox.org – A very large database of books in the public domain, also you can record your own and give a little back!
Gutenberg.org - There are over 20,000 free audio and ebooks in the Gutenberg Project – started by Michael Hart who invented eBooks in the early ’70’s
Happy Listening!
TrainWithThom.com
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Topics: How To's, LifeHacks | 1 Comment »
May 11th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Don’t you have any more wisdom to share with us? You spent so much time on this site and I haven’t heard from you in months!!