I’ve been ramping up my reading again lately –which is I’m thrilled I am doing— and I’ve further added audio books to the mix over the last 9 months or so. Audio books steal some time away from my podcast subscriptions, but it has been worth it.

I tend to listen a bit less intently to most podcasts, whereas I try to focus more when listening to audio books. Some of this difference probably lies in the fact that most of the books I read are not fiction, which I tend to think of as usually being “easier reading” than the technical, business, self-improvement, history, biography, science, and philosophy books I usually read. I listen to podcasts (unless I’m listening to music, which is just as, if not more, likely) when multi-tasking: getting ready in the morning, doing dishes, driving; but audio books I save for things like walks (which I’m also doing more of lately – yay me) or when enjoying a glass of bourbon.

Anyway, the dilemma I now find myself with is whether to get new books in eBook or audio book format. As an aside, it is almost always clear if it is a book I’m going to get in printed form.

I generally don’t get technical books in audio format, as there’s just too much detail I need to see with my eyes, at my own pace. After that criterion, I try to guess whether I’m going to want to take notes, make highlights, re-read passages, or refer back to sections. My wife got an Audible subscription that we both use, and we often have credits at the ready, so the audio format is, in a sense, already paid for, but will I be able to get enough value from the audio format?

So far, I’ve usually been correct in my determinations, yet I still have a several books in more than one format – admittedly, though, two of those were intentional: James Clear’s Atomic Habits (because I wanted to ingest it more than once, in more than one way) and Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time (because it was awesome and my wife was reading it at the same time).

Enough of my rambling. Back I go to my trying to decide about Scott Young’s Ultralearning… Actually, I think I just decided to go with the audio format for this one, with the thought that if I find it worthy of a “re-read,” I’ll go in the opposite direction I went with Atomic Habits and get the eBook second. I guess my rambling helped clarify my thoughts a little, which is a result I hoped for when I started this post. :)