Paper Books, Kindle, or Audiobooks: What’s the Best Way to Read?

hey what's going on friends so today we are answering a question that i've gotten asked quite a few times over the years which is what is the best format to read books in physical books ebooks or audiobooks where i guess you aren't actually reading the book but you are still in taking it well i'm gonna save you the horse race here because in my experience i use all three formats and all three of these can be perfectly viable ways to intake a book but depending on how you are reading and the purpose of your reading one of the three might have a slight edge over the others so that's kind of what i want to go into in this video and i'm not going to break this video down by the format itself and section out that way instead i want to look at the purpose for which we read because i think there are four main purposes for why we pick up a book first and foremost we sometimes read for relaxation we read for escapism we just want to have fun through reading we may also read to widen our learning our base of knowledge or to widen our tea if you want to think about it that way the concept of a t-shaped person where you have deep knowledge in one area then wide expansive knowledge and many other areas as well you may also read for deep learning to deeply understand a topic and finally you might read for reference for research for a specific purpose where you're trying to pull knowledge out of a book and apply it to something you're trying to do so for each of these four different purposes what is the best format to choose well again i think it really comes down to what you enjoy using all the edges that we're gonna be talking here are the advantages i think they're slight for the most part and ultimately reading and the format you choose to read in is just like exercise there's no perfect routine because the best overall routine is the one that you enjoy and will stick to for the first purpose for reading for escapism and for fun what is the best format well i think in general the best format here is physical books there's some actual research behind this now the first study that we looked at for this video was albeit pretty small in terms of sample size but they did find that versus ebooks people who read physical books were actually better able to remember the order in which things happened in a story there might be something to the physical tactile sensations you get through reading a book the you know the act of turning a page the act of remembering which side of the book you were looking at when something happened that allows you to have a little bit better memory of what went on than when you're just looking at an ipad screen or a kindle screen just scrolling through in my case a never-ending wall of text because i typically use the scrolling mode on the kindle app another potential downside to ebooks in particular is the fact that we often read them on tablets and even the kindle devices have web browser built in albeit not a very good one and we have access to additional information additional things we can do with our device it gets a little bit harder to really sink into the world of the book and to really feel like you are reading for fun to get lost in the story now what about audiobooks for fun reading for escapism there are quite a few audiobooks i've actually gone through in terms of fiction that i've really enjoyed specifically the one that keeps coming to mind for me while i film this video is the martian by andy weir and i have the old rc bray narrated version that they no longer have on audible which is absolutely amazing but i also know that i typically listen to audiobooks when i'm doing things when i'm riding my bike or walking to work or doing chores around the house and because i'm also doing something else that takes a little bit of my attention not a ton but a little bit they're gonna be pieces that i just sort of tune out for i'm gonna have to navigate a road crossing or something and that means i'm not getting every single bit of the story and i'm not totally immersed so again i think the edge really goes to paper books for escapism style reading now what about widening your tea widening your base of knowledge well like i said earlier the concept of being a t-shaped person means that you've built deep expertise in at least one area but then you're also reading to widen your array of knowledge across a broad variety of topics and for doing that again these are small edges we're talking about here but i actually am personally going to give the edge to audio books and that is because for this purpose for just trying to widen your base of knowledge that need for complete immersion is less important and i'm a busy guy i've got a lot of things i have to do around the house a lot of time i have to walk to work every single day there's time throughout the day where i have to do something where my attention isn't completely taken up and i might otherwise just listen to podcasts or spotify or just find something to listen to on youtube but i can also select a book and i can broaden my knowledge on something in a pretty shallow way that's still interesting and enlightening using an audiobook for example i've been riding my bike to work over the past few months listening to bill bryson's book on the human body and i don't feel that i need a complete and super deep understanding of all these different structures i just want to learn for learning's sake so the audiobook format is perfect for that purpose now aside from audiobooks i don't think there's a huge edge between ebooks and physical books when it comes to this type of learning i might give a slight nod to ebooks simply because it is typically easier to get a new book on a whim and there are even library programs that will let you borrow ebooks on your electronic devices so it's just easier to get your hands on an ebook when you want to read something on a whim now one area where i definitely think ebooks

have the clear advantage is when you're reading for the purposes of research and reference when you're trying to pull knowledge out of a book and actually do something with it synthesize the information and write a book report or in my case the huge video that i'm working on for later this month is an ultimate guide to using credit cards i've been trying to pull information out of several different sources including books and synthesize into something that i can present to this channel and present it to my blog as well so i need to pull accurate information i need to collect it and i think ebooks definitely make this process easier not least which because you can search an ebook you can easily bring up a little search field and you can type in a term and see where it pops up in the book additionally highlighting and taking notes is quite a bit easier with ebooks on the kindle app for example you can just use your finger and create a highlight and those highlights actually get collected in a centralized location within the book whereas with a paper book there are definitely ways to highlight i made an entire video about how i highlight and take notes from books that you can watch after this one but it's kind of harder to go find those highlights you don't know where they are you can't search them and it's a little bit harder to collect the information from them than it is with say a kindle book additionally you can go even further than simply highlighting in the kindle app and the ibooks app because there is an app that i use every day called read wise and what read wise does is it basically just collects your highlights from kindle books but also from articles from tweets from certain podcast apps and it keeps them in a central repository and it goes one step further because they have a public api where you can export your highlights to apps like obsidian rome and in my case notion so i use read wise for the express purpose of getting my highlights from kindle books and from other sources into a notion database from there i can add notes to them and i can even use synced blocks to bring those highlights and those little passages that i'm using for research into the video script and research areas that i'm working on now to be fair to paper books there is also a read wise app for mobile devices where you can actually take a picture of the printed page and it has that optical character recognition technology so you can actually create a read-wise highlight from a paper book but it is a little bit of a slower and more friction full process than just creating a very quick highlight in the kindle app and that brings us to our final purpose for reading which is reading for deep understanding as opposed to that wide understanding that builds the horizontal part of your tee we're talking now about that vertical bar building really deep understanding of a specific topic and here i think the edge actually goes back to paper books specifically because they make it so much easier to focus not get distracted by whatever else is on your device it's just a little bit easier to maintain focus on a paper book at least in my experience than it is on an ebook when you're trying to read for deep understanding and not necessarily trying to pull out references for a research project though there is a potential alternative so recently a friend gifted me the ebook version of alex ramos's 100 million dollar offers and right in the first chapter he mentions that a trick he uses is actually getting the audiobook version and listening to it while following along in the print or the ebook version as well and he says it actually helps him read faster because it helps him to pay attention to the ebook for a lot longer now i do want to mention that if you do this it's probably not going to make you read faster from an objective sense and that is because ebooks are typically narrated at about an average of 150 words per minute whereas skilled readers who are reading silently to themselves and not subvocalizing can typically read between 200 and 400 words per minute without losing a lot of comprehension so unless you want to set the audiobook to 2x speed which does not sound very pleasant to me you're probably going to end up actually reading a little bit slower than you would if you were just silently reading to yourself but if the focus benefit is there it might be a useful strategy for you now one thing i want to mention that doesn't really fit into any of these specific categories is that ebooks do have a clear advantage over many print books and the fact that they are more accessible because you can easily change the font size you can switch things into dark mode you have a lot of options there so again at the end of the day the format that works best for you is going to be the one that is number one most accessible to you but number two is the one that you enjoy reading so hopefully this has broken down a few of the different potential technological advantages format advantages and focus advantages but again ultimately the kind of format that you enjoy the most is going to be the best one the majority of the time it's also worth noting that the format of the books you read really isn't the most important factor to reading more often reading more deeply that is building a reading habit which in my experience is pretty easy to fall out of but it's also possible to get back into as well one useful tactic that i've used in the past is a 90-day reading challenge essentially i told my friend martin hey i'm going to read non-fiction every single day for the next 90 days if i don't i'm going to pay you 100 bucks and i gave him a spreadsheet where i tracked all my progress and he could follow along every single day that was a very successful challenge i read 11 books during those three months many of which i reference all the time on this channel and actually built my reading habit long term after that and there are a lot of other tricks you can use for building long-term habits whether it's reading more books or doing anything else you want to do and if you want to learn about some of those tricks you may want to take my habit building class over on skillshare this is a short one-hour but information-packed class on how to break

down your goals into actionable daily habits and then actually stick to them long term which is probably something you've been thinking about recently since this video is going live pretty close to january 1st so if you've got a habit you've been wanting to build or you've been trying to build you've been failing and you want to find some better tactics for getting it to actually stick i think you're going to get a lot out of this class over 60 000 people have already taken it and i would love for you to take it as well and guess what if you're one of the first 1 000 people to click that link in the description down below and sign up for skillshare you're actually going to get a one month free trial which means that you can take this class absolutely free and you can take a ton of other classes during that one month as well including mkbhd's excellent class on crafting great youtube videos along with thousands of other classes from expert teachers on business and marketing storytelling audio engineering video animation and tons of other topics so if you want to start building your skills habits with my class and support this channel you can sign up for skillshare using the link in the description down below and again if you're one of the first 1 000 people you're gonna get that free one month trial you can also click right there on screen to sign up and if you enjoyed this video if you're looking for something else to watch i've got one more video right there on seven books you should read in your 20s and even if you're not in your 20s i think they're pretty good reads as well