I have discovered audiobooks recently. Before this, of course I was not a big fan of audiobooks. I was unsure, I was a bit of a purist. I used to feel that if you want to read a book, you know, read a book.

Of course I also used to be someone who wrote everything that they wrote on a keyboard. These days I am asking Wispr Flow what to type and it does that.

Speech is natural and it is fast.

The second thing is about time.

I bought a car recently. And what that has meant is the time I used to have sitting in a metro reading a book is just not there anymore. So I can either listen to songs on my way to work (which is a 30-minute approximately drive one way) or listen to podcasts, or the third thing being listen to audiobooks. I have picked the last thing.

Of course, another factor nudging me in that direction was molly White’s YouTube video where she talked about how she was able to read so much. A secret? Audiobooks and reading 3-4 books at a time.

This is something that I have realized as well. There are some books, mostly nonfiction, where you want to be reading it because, at least that’s how I think, those books require you to concentrate more and reading a book allows you to concentrate more. What I’ve found in my limited experience is that fictional books are better as audiobooks or books in which you are telling a story. Those could be like literary nonfiction as well.

Because, with audiobooks, most of the time you are doing something while you are reading the book or listening to it.

Here’s the thing. I had this thought today while I was in the break area. It’s where I usually have my phone out and I’m reading through my RSS feed on Net News Wire.

And I had this thought today, “Wouldn’t it be better if I could just continue reading the book I was listening to while I was driving?”

It’s simple: the idea is that I should be able to pick up where I had left off, and if I want to, start reading the book.

I don’t think technically it is something that is out of reach for people. Of course, the quality of the voice doing the narration for an audiobook varies. It varies a lot. If you used a simple text-to-speech engine with Whisper and everything else they have gotten good enough, I feel.

Yesterday, I wrote about a Notebook LM launching a new feature. I feel Notebook LM, as a product, has shown that text-to-speech products are good enough. Kindle could add this feature to their app, wherein you could just ask it to read your book. You don’t need a separate Audible app for that.

I think it’s a simple enough idea and it’s easily achievable. The problem, I think, is with the fact that the book companies won’t license you the rights. It’s about money at the end of the day.

But I think in terms of experience, it’s a better thing, a better product that you could consume your book how you want to.

There are two excellent examples for this:

1. A book I started reading today itself, which is available as a book on the web, as a PDF download, as Mobi, as a podcast, or as a single MP3 file. It’s called “Resilient Web Design”. That is something that made me think about it.
2. The second one that I can think of now was Derek Sivers and his idea that once you buy the book, you know just if you want to get a physical book, pay for the print and the other editions come with it. Same for if you just want the digital, you’ll get the PDF, EPUB, whatever, all of those in one go.

The technology I think clearly exists to make it happen. Hopefully someone does make it happen. I would love to be able to pick up a book, read, then listen to it on my way back or something, and then pick it up and start reading it again, having it sync automatically through all the states.

I think it would be a great experience.