Why I hate e-books and Audiobooks?
E-books and Audio Books have gained a lot of attraction in the past few years and 2020 being the year of covid-19 and people being bored and trying out a new hobby.
Background
When the whole world is in chaos I am the person who would be calmly staring at my computer screen. Creating something, sometimes figuring out how to create something but most of my task is done on my computer or a mobile device i.e. Staring at a digital screen. Whenever I am working, I most probably am sucked inside the work but since the work that I am doing is on a digital screen there has been many instance in which I was way close to the screen (Sometimes pixels were visible too).
Why not E-books?
Working in a digital screen is different compared to working with real life objects (Objects which does not virtualize or simulate other environments). If you take the story of a developer, He / She will have already built a huge hypothetical proof of concept on their head and while their fingers switching between different keys in their keyboard, The eyes too are acquiring equal amount of strain and the mind busy processing and converting the bits of thoughts into computer understandable instructions. The same would be the story for a digital designer. You as the person reading this might also be working at your computer desk for quite long period of time.
So basically looking at your screen for most hours in a day is bad in many ways. Yes there are workarounds like getting up and walking for 5 minutes every hour and other similar exercises but once I sit down I like to finish my work first and then get up to get distracted. Reading books are some kind of relaxation and you make sure that you are completely relaxed by avoiding stress and other issues so that when you start working again you have a fresh mind to work with. Reading e-books removes the fun of turning pages improving strain on the eyes and mostly easily distracted (If you are reading on phones) Thus not being a ideal mode of reading.
Why Not Audio Books?
Honestly, Very few things of all that I hear actually gets registered in my mind. Most of the content are being purposely ignored especially content tagged with Rumor, Useless Talk etc. Even if these things stick on my mind it won’t be sticking on for long. And the time taken for us to calculate the probability to listen to the noise source varies depending on many factors including the delivered way of speech, the relevance of the knowledge of the person etc.
Audio Books are the best way to consume knowledge of people who are unable to read due to physical challenge or any other reason.
As a nerd, it’s better to spend some money and buy a physical book to enjoy the real experience.
Please Note
- E-books are pretty cheap too
- You have a little bit of control over the fonts and other attributes (May or may not be available based on different platform). So books with poor font size like Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman will be better off reading with a e-book (I opted for a physical copy though).
