Audio

Ebibliomedia makes it possible to borrow audiobooks. Yesterday I noticed that I can download these books via the Cantook ereader app on Android and iOS. With this freedom comes a quick and convenient way to listen to audio books without worrying about losing my place.

With the website interface I could listen to a book but my progress would be lost as soon as I refreshed the page. In such a situation it makes sense to read a book one chapter at a time, and make sure to remember which chapter you have just finished.

There was a time when it was much easier to listen to every episode of a podcast for two reasons. The first of these is that they were new so it wouldn’t take too long to burn through one hundred episodes. The second reason is that podcasts were half an hour long so you could listen to two or three during a one or one and a half hour walk.

I have been an audible member for years at this point and in that time I have “bought” hundreds of books. I write “bought” because I payed for a Platinum account for years and got credits and got the books with those credits. Over the years I have collected more books than I can read in a year.

That library lived in the cloud, rather than my devices, for years. I would download the books I was listening to but not those that I had finished, or would read later. That’s because laptops and mobile phones have smaller hard drives than I require for my books.

There was a time when I wanted to listen to hours of podcasts a day, and I did. I would listen on my walks, on my commutes to work, while driving and more. I would love listening to podcasts so much that I would wish I had more time to spend on listening to podcasts. That, unfortunately changed, as podcasts became livestreams, and thus unedited.

Too Long For Casual Listening

It’s not that I don’t like listening to people talk, but that when a podcast goes from being fourty five minutes to an hour long, to being one and a half to two hours long then it becomes too long for a walk, and too time consuming to listen to more than one podcast a day. It gets worse. The problem with This Week in Tech, and that entire network of podcasts is that by being unedited they waste our time. Instead of getting tech news we get personal stories. Instead of analysis and context we get opinion and sidetracked. They used to joke about rat holes. By being live and unedited, when shared as podcasts, they become irrelevant.
Hiking podcasts, programming podcasts and others all make this mistake. The result is that listening to podcasts is less engaging than it was. What makes this worse is that podcasts are sponsored and funded, so as they become profitable they become less engaging for the listener.