Recently I tried Amazon Audible. Honestly, it was because of the free trial as I was a bit skeptical about the whole listening books rather than reading books. I have always considered reading the best mode of earning anything new. But, to my surprise, listening to a book was a completely different experience. It had some clear advantages over reading books.
So I thought, I should share some of the advantages of listening to audio books over reading books.
Advantages of listening to audio books
- You can listen to it on the go, be it driving, walking, or running.
Reading books requires concentration. You can’t do anything else while reading. Since audio books are always available on your phone, you can listen to it anytime. It doesn’t matter where you are or what you are doing.
2. Good Audible books give you better understanding as spoken language will have delivery emotions too.
The major challenge of written communication is that it fails to capture emotions effectively. Verbal communication is always better at communicating emotions. Please note that it is not always necessary, because some audio books are read by software, which makes it an awful listening experience.
3. You can set your own listening pace.
Audible software has the setting of listening pace, which you can adjust according to your own taste. If you are a native speaker or very good in a given language, you can set a faster pace, or if you are a non-native speaker than you can slow down the pace as per your liking.
4. Book is completed in lesser time than reading.
Because book is always readily available, you can listen to it anytime, anywhere. This typically help you in completing the book in lesser time.
Cons:
- There are no dictionary help for difficult words. If you are a non-native reader, you might end up losing the opportunity to learn new words, which is the next disadvantage.
- Reading makes you learn new words. You can always learn new words by reading them. Audible does not gives you the same opportunity.
- Costly over books: Audio books are costlier than normal books and services like Audible only provide 1 credit per month for 1 book. This again defeats the purpose of completing books at a faster pace as purchasing new audio books will be hard on your pocket.
To conclude, if you love reading and don’t have time or bandwidth, audio books are great alternatives. You can try services like Audible which has following benefits:
- 1 month free trial with 1 credit
- All the audiobooks in your Audible library are yours to keep, even if you cancel the membership.
- You can download the book offline.
I sincerely think that if there are options that give you the best of both of the worlds could be a fantastic idea. This way you can listen and read at the same time if needed, and that service would sell like hotcakes.