How to read more books

As others have pointed out, libraries often have Libby access which can have pretty huge selections of audiobooks. There's a discovery feature that lets you search by vibe, which I am finding useful.

One could make the same fallacious "form affects content" argument against books, but in reality authors rarely write stories for people randomly flipping pages, at most the author will tell them or explain why they might want to turn to a particular page. Similarly most content on the web doesn't assume you are jumping to links and coming back, but instead uses them as an index of references.

There are style problems of course, too much surface area, over-reliance on and under-appreciation of sources. There is nothing pure about text. Any form requires training on the part of the consumer to appreciate the "depth". From what I can see people don't care about the content, they don't even care about comparing the trade-offs from one form to another beyond format prestige and convenience.

Please look at how books actually make money rather than assuming a priori that they optimize for "lifetime value" instead of some platonic ideal book that exists in your head. Now if you're more adept at a particular medium due to practice that's a valid reason to stick with it, but it's not one to spread vile propaganda about a medium and convince its consumers to turn off their brains because the medium's difficulty matrix applied to thought patterns is different.

If you disagree, fine, feel free to write software like this [1] and pray that the problem doesn't naturally require indirection. Code is just another medium, yes the inclusion of abstractions is poison for deep thought, but not every problem is best solved by deep thought. "Study long, study wrong."

[1] https://cbarrete.com/carmack.html

- AntennaPod (Android: https://antennapod.org/about/) doesn't specifically block ads, but does make skipping them fairly painless. I'm not familiar with the iOS app space.

- Seek out, and add a classification tag for ad-free podcasts. When you're not in the mood for dealing with ads, play these.

- Protip: if you learn, or want to learn, German, Deutschlandfunk (and a number of other German-language broadcasters) have a set of excellent, ad-free, podcasts. This includes a number of podcasts for learning German (generally through the Goethe Institute or Deutsche Welle).

- If your podcast app permits it, set your forward-skip to 30 or 60 seconds (the length of most ad beds), and backwards to 5 seconds. You'll be able to navigate past most ad blocks more easily. You can also set begin/end skip periods for start/end of episode advertising.

- I've thought of manually editing episodes from a desktop session using audio editing software (Audacity or similar). That's ... a bit of additional overhead, but as with other mise en place techniques, you incur the overhead once and don't have to worry about the interruptions when you're in the middle of listening to an episode. Audacity shows sound signatures and I'm expecting that most ad blocks will be readily apparent. I also suspect AI tools might be able to remove ads fairly reliably, though haven't looked into this yet.

I've definitely noticed that I deliberately avoid listening to podcasts which have ads when I don't have the bandwidth / freedom to deal with them (e.g., doing other tasks, walking etc.). And advertising has become more pervasive, longer, more intrusively inserted, and annoying with time.

Other ad-free English-language pods: Tech Can't Save Us, History of Philosophy (Without Any Gaps), and Philosophy Bites (and several affiliated podcasts). All are highly informative, well-produced, don't fixate on current events and politics (which ... I find maddening). And several of those would appreciate any support as well.

My wife and oldest son can read books in a few hours. My son (17) has read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. I'm a slow reader. I take forever, find it hard to focus, and often my thoughts distract me from the words on the page.

My youngest son (11) has dyslexia and barely reads. I used to read for him before going to bed, but eventually stopped because I figured he was old enough to read by himself, but he doesn't. So I started again. Now I'm reading Lord of the Rings to him before bedtime. The ritual helps us get through it at a steady pace, but I'm still terribly slow at reading my own books.