My new hybrid way of reading Books at 2X your speed? 🎧 + 📖
Ever wondered about clubbing the use of both audiobook and paperback books?
How I read my books
I maintain an 80:20 ratio between the audiobooks and paperback books.
The main reason being that paperback takes more energy for me to read whereas audiobooks provide a hands-off experience.
Again this decision of whether to read a book in audio format or paperback highly depends on the genre of the book.
I personally like to listen to autobiographies and read self-help books.
Background
A couple of days back I started to read this book - Atomic Habits.
Atomic Habits focussed on how “Tiny Changes can bring in Remarkable Results”
Now, this is a kind of book that I really want to take actionable insights and try practicing them in my life.
So I got the paperback so that I can mark and underline important examples, case studies, and actionable experiments that I want to try out to build habits.
Here comes another problem, I have a lower speed when I read the book than an audiobook. At least this is where I personally stand.
The concept of Speed Reading
I recently stumbled upon this term called Speed Reading and we can clearly understand what these terms mean.
Going further I watched this awesome TedX talk on Speed Reading which you can also have a look at.
My new style of Speed Reading
After reading through this one thing that I understood was that I should do something while reading paperback which would help me speed going through the writings on the book.
I started an experiment 🧪
I started to listen the audiobook and follow through the same lines in the paperback and kept on marking imporant areas.
In short it was this >> 🎧 + 📖
I tried this for a day and it went very well.
💡 I was able to read 2X the number of pages of what could I have read without the audiobook and paperback parallelly in sync.
Now you might argue that listening and going through paperback can be difficult to follow through.
Yes, It will be for the first couple of minutes.
When you follow through the pace of the narrator in the audiobook and are set with it, then it’s gonna be a cakewalk.
I did this for 4 days and I was able to complete Atomic Habits. In total, I spend about an hour a day and a total of 4 hours over 4 days to read around 250 pages.
That’s cool, isn’t it?
I’m not saying you should be doing this way as well. But all I wanted to share is to share my findings.
This way of speed reading not only picked up my pace of reading books, but it made it even more fun.
Now I also have the important parts of the bookmarked which I can now again revise just by reading them in under an hour(all of the summary).
Which App did I use for Audiobooks?
I have personally used multiple apps like Audible, Koo, Storytel, and Scribd for audiobooks.
Scribd came to become my personal favorite for multiple reasons.
Scribd offers the following :
BOOKS
AUDIOBOOKS
MAGAZINES
PODCASTS
DOCUMENTS
The offerings of Scribd are like a one-stop shop for my reading.
If I don’t like reading a book then I can listen. I can go across podcasts or even check research documents etc.
Scribd has become a handy app for me to save and learn from all these modes of learning.
Another benefit is that you pay for Scribd and get all of these in a bundle(ebooks, audiobooks, podcasts, magazines, documents) and it’s unlimited reading and listening unlike Audible where you get only 1 credit a month and have access only to audiobooks.
So this is my I call Scribd “The best app to read books ever: Scribd - My Personal favorite”
Here’s a special two free months to get you started in case you wanna try out Scribd: Try Scribd for free
I hope that my experiment and experience of the new way of speed reading using an audiobook + paperback i.e. 🎧 + 📖. Has helped you with some though provocative methods to read books with 2X your normal speed of reading a paperback.
If you have any interesting speed reading tactics that you follow. Let me know in a comment.
The showcase - my personal favorites tools 🎁
Listen to audiobooks, read ebooks, magazines all on 1 platform I💓Scribd (Get Scribd Free for 60days)
The best video 📽 creation tool for all platforms. No experience required. 4000+ templates & you can convert text to video as well. I ❤ InVideo
I swear that I use these tools myself on a day-to-day basis and love using them.
I hope you had fun reading through this write-up. If you liked it drop a like and subscribe to unknownVC :)
I will see in the next one :)