Richard Dawkins and audio books versus ebooks

I'm in love with ebooks. I never would have thought the main use for my PDA would be to read text. Games? Sure. Music? Of course! But reading text? Ironic when you think about it, using a 200Mhz PDA with 64MB of RAM and a 2GB SD-card (something nearly as powerful as a 1980's super computer, yet already dated by today's newest models) to read text.

For any serious reader, I highly recommend ebooks. You don't need an expensive PDA, even a cheap model can handle the small ebook files. I don't mean relatively small, I mean small - you can fit several large (think Harry Potter in terms of pages) books on a floppy, so even the most modest PDA in terms of storage can handle a small library.

Here are some of the advantages: they're cheap (just a few bucks even for popular titles), you can read with one hand (including turning the "pages") and do it in total darkness, you can bookmark your spot (and set as many as you want), you can scribble and draw on the pages without of actually damaging them, and you can carry lots of books with you.

They do have devices that are pure ebook readers, but they don't all (at least they didn't - I haven't looked into them in years) have displays with back-lights nor do they typically use a stylus, but even the cheapest PDA from Palm can handle all of the above, so I really can't imagine spending money on a device just for ebooks. Many cell phones are either full-blown PDAs or very PDA-like and also have ebook reader software available (though a lower-end cell phone might lack some of the cooler features, like being able to take notes on a virtual page).

Audio books can be nice - I fell in love with them twice in the last 10 years. "Reading" them feels like cheating, allowing you to easily finish a book with minimal effort very quickly. That's just an illusion though; I'm probably not alone when I say that I can read text far faster than someone else can read that same text back to me. When we read to ourselves, we don't usually mentally pronounce each word. In my case, I don't even see the words after a while, nor do I remember turning the pages.

Stopping and starting the audio as the real world intrudes is also really annoying, much more so than being interrupted while reading text. And in my personal case, my trusty cheap portable CD player was ill equipped for the format, lacking the ability to "bookmark" a spot in an audio track, or even to pause for long periods (it would shut itself off after a few minutes of inactivity).

While ebooks are my favorite way to read, there are some obvious drawbacks, the same drawbacks that paper books have. You can't read an ebook while driving, mowing the lawn, shoveling snow, driving to work, folding laundry or doing the dishes. So, when I was ready to read the latest by Richard Dawkins, "The God Delusion", I tried my luck with the audio format once again. This time, however, I copied the mp3 files (I didn't realize that they came in this format, though from a real audio CD, it's easy enough to make your own) and copied them to my PDA. Now I can pause anywhere for any length of time and save my spot, even in the middle of a track.


Perhaps the ideal answer is to have both the ebook and the audio book together. Now, if only the software could sync them up for you, marking a spot in the audio to match the last page read in the text version, and marking the spot in the text that matches the furthest listened too in the audio. That way, one could switch back and forth at will depending on the circumstance...That's a good idea, if I do say so myself! I should probably try to patent it, but it's likely, along with 30 similar but better ideas, already patented and claimed by some entity out there...

As for the book itself, it's fabulous and I'll hopefully write about it here soon. This evening or tomorrow evening, an article about the book should appear at useless-knowledge.com.