Everyone Listen Up!!!

If you are reading on a smartphone, use landscape / hold phone sideways. 

On December 10th, Seth's Blog declared this as his Book of the Year. I always find it cool how you can just say "Seth" and you know who I am talking about. If you simply type "Seth" into Google, he comes up first. Anyway, Seth says:

"The Wizard and the Prophet (book) delivers on so many things that we want a book to do - it could never be replicated by a website or even a film. The audiobook is even better - it's engaging, powerful and resonates really deeply."

Seth Godin said the audiobook is even better. Let that sink in.

There has been the debate of reading vs. audiobooks for years. For a 2016 study, Beth Rogowsky, an associate professor of education put her assumptions to the test. One group listened to Unbroken, a nonfiction book about World War II (by Laura Hillenbrand) while a second group read the same. A third group read AND listened at the same time. Afterward, everyone took a quiz designed to measure how well they had absorbed the material. "We found no significant differences in comprehension between reading, listening, or reading AND listening simultaneously," Rogowsky says. 

Personally, I love listening to audiobooks. And, when "read by the author" it is even better. It feels like a Master Class, with the author right there in the room (or in the car, or in the park) with me. 

Audiobooks have some strengths. Humans have been sharing information orally for tens of thousands of years, while the written word is a much more recent invention. When we are reading we are using parts of the brain that evolved for other purposes. We are making our brains do something that our brains were not really made to do - the cognitive task of reading is not normal. Listeners however, can derive a lot of information from a speaker's inflections, or intonations. Sarcasm is much more easily communicated via audio than printed text. People who hear Shakespeare spoken out loud tend to glean much more meaning from the actor's delivery, for example.

NYDLA.org was always all about distance learning, morphing into DIGITAL learning, and today it is really just DIGITAL LIVING. From TED talks to audio/video podcasts, to Zoom becoming a verb, technology based learning systems (TBLS) are now in every part of our lives. I always felt that Audiobooks were front and center in the distance (digital) learning world. 

And so, I have downloaded The Wizard and the Prophet from Audible. 

Brevity is bliss: Seth was right.