Listening while I read
I’ve always found the idea of listening to a book while you read it to be very interesting, and my recent conversation with Chris Gardner helped bring that back to the surface.
However, I came across a surprisingly difficult problem: how do you actually do it?
Chris uses Kindle + Audible, which is the most common solution. However, this has two major problems:
If you do it this way, you need to purchase every book twice (Kindle, and then again for Audible), which can really add up.
Next, I looked around at other common reading apps such as Apple Books, Kobo, Nook and others, but none really did it. You essentially can on Apple with the “buy it twice” method, but that didn’t really help. Plus, Apple keeps their books very locked down, so there would be no way to ever read them elsewhere if I wanted to.
Speechify?
I thought I had found the answer with Speechify. You can upload any book to it, and then it uses AI to read the book and it does a fantastic job! However, it had two problems:
It can be tricky to load your books on there, which I’ll talk more about in a moment.
They removed their “bookmark/highlight/note” feature, so there is no way to note important parts of a book while you’re reading/listening. You’d need a third-party app (or paper) to take notes off to the side. That could be ok sometimes, but problematic at others.
Also, Speechify is a little pricy ($29/mo), but you’d save more than that amount by avoiding the “double purchase” of every book, so that wasn’t necessarily a deal-breaker.
ElevenReader
Ultimately, I’ve decided to go with ElevenReader for now, a product from the folks at Eleven Labs (a popular AI-powered text-to-speech app).
ElevenReader has very good AI-powered reading, costs less than Speechify ($10/mo for most people), and has a nice “bookmark” feature to save snippets of interest while you read.
Books?
Like Speechify, though, ElevenReader needs you to upload your own books, which can be a challenge. How do you buy an ebook and then unlock it so you can upload it to another service? Two things help me here:
I’m still going to purchase books via Kobo, as I have been recently, because they make it relatively easy to download and use.
I grabbed all of my Kindle books before it was too late, so I can use those in there too when the time comes to reread a classic.
Here is a short video to show kind of how ElevenReader works:
In addition, ElevenReader can create AI summaries of your documents, which are really quite good. This means I’m likely done using Shortform and Blinkist, as I can run some pretty solid summaries right inside of the app.
For most people, the big holdup will be needing to convert their books in order to use them, and that’s a fair argument. It really comes down to this: do you want to rent your books with Amazon, or do you actually want to own them? I don’t mean that sarcastically, as for some people it simply might be easier to just rent them and move on.
Plus, any degree of “I need to download and convert my books and then upload them to be able to read is kind of a pain“, but I think it’s a healthy pain. Through this process I’ve been able to convert most old my old ebooks (206 of them so far) into an open format that works with virtually any service. Even if ElevenReader ends up being a bad decision in the future, or they shut down the app or whatever, my books are now all in a format (simply tucked away in Dropbox) that will work great with anything else that comes out in the future.
The other minor downside is that this app (as well as Speechify and others) doesn’t sync your highlights directly into Readwise. I’m ok with that as well, because my goal with Readwise is to revisit my highlights more often, and manually putting them in there is a great way for their first review.
That was a lot of work simply so I can “listen while I read”, and so far I like it! We’ll see if it sticks, but I’ve learned a lot through this process and I have my book library in much healthier shape, so it’s a win no matter what happens next.
Too much work - while there may be some benefits, by the time I actually set everything I could have already read the book.