How I read a book a day
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What started as a way to improve my English listening skills turned into an
addiction hobby: audiobooks.
Audiobooks are pretty much recordings of someone reading a book. They are designed for "productively lazy" people.
Humans differ in whether they prefer to learn by reading or by listening. For me, reading tires my eyes too quickly and distracts me from the content. Listening lets me close my eyes or do a repetitive task (walk!), leaving my brain fully focused on the book.
If you retain information better by reading than by listening - more power to you. You should try speed-reading. For me, though, listening is the superpower.
Over time, I increased the audiobook playback rate. Nowadays, I listen comfortably to most content at 3x-4x speed. You can practice this too by gradually increasing the playback rate beyond your comfort zone over the course of a year.
The book per day equation
Not many people have time to read books. Almost no one has time for a book per day. Audiobooks flip the equation.
There are many activities that can be combined with listening to a book:
Commuting (walking to work and back, getting groceries, running errands)
Household chores (laundry, cleaning)
Breakfast and dinner
Light exercise
A midday break during a stressful day
Personal care (dental care, showering when not washing my hair)
Waiting in line; sitting in the airport; enjoying the vacation
Playing a game, preferably one with minimal dialogue and text. Minecraft is the best fit. No Man's Sky and Factorio work great too. Combine one with a LitRPG book, and you get an awesome atmosphere
Office work, when doing an extremely repetitive task (data cleanup, testing, migration)
Lying in bed for 30 minutes to wind down before sleep
You definitely have some of the above in your daily routine. An audiobook can turn a boring chore into the most interesting part of the day.
On an average day, I get about 3 hours of listening to books. That, combined with a 3x-4x playback rate, means I can get through nearly one average-length book per day.
In practice, I don't quite get to 365 books a year. In 2025, I read 277. This is because I consume non-book audio content too (podcasts, YouTube videos, and articles converted to audio).
What is the maximum playback rate?
Besides training yourself to pick up words faster, several factors affect the maximum comfortable rate:
Recording quality
The speaker's accent
Pronunciation clarity. High-quality text-to-speech is usually clearer than a human voice at high speeds
Background noise
Topic difficulty (numbers, technical terms, archaic words, overly poetic language)
Mental fatigue and how much focus the task you are doing while listening requires
The speaker's pace
Generally, YouTube videos have a lower information density than audiobooks. I comfortably listen to most videos at 4x. YouTubers often stretch videos to fit more ads. If I focus deeply, I can listen to some videos at up to 5x.
I am far from the fastest listeners, though. Under ideal conditions (clear text-to-speech, high-quality headphones, and a quiet environment), trained listeners can reach 5x-7.5x (800-1,200 words per minute). Blind screen-reader users listen at these speeds. This is amazing throughput - at least until we get Neuralink.
At the other extreme, I listen to technical audiobooks at 2x-3x, with frequent rewinds to catch the numbers.
Movies have lots of background effects, so the practical playback rate only goes up to 1.5x-2x. Yes, you can speed-watch a movie and enjoy it just as much.
An unexpected superpower from speed listening: you can watch work meeting recordings at high speed. I use 3x-4x to absorb the content (though I go slower if the audio quality is poor) and 5x if I merely care to pick up whether a relevant topic was mentioned to slow down for it.
Besides biological limits, however, there are artificial technical limits:
Audible only lets you go up to 3.5x
Libby only goes up to 3x (😭)
YouTube Premium on a phone goes up to 4x (enough for most content)
BookPlayer (where you provide your own audio files) goes up to 4x, but you can pre-process the audio to speed it up
If your favorite player only goes up to 3x, you have little opportunity to practice at higher speeds.
Are there downsides to speed listening?
Absolutely!
Daily conversation becomes too slow. Your mind begins to wander between the words. By the time a sentence ends, you have already forgotten the beginning. I have to consciously repeat what is being said in my mind, or I start thinking about a different topic.
Live meetings and university lectures become a chore. I either multitask or catch up using the recording.
With training, you can extract all the meaning from fast playback, but the specific wording is lost. This manifests in two ways:
A fast playback rate doesn't teach you better pronunciation. If you want to improve your accent, you need to slow down.
Phrases like "the former ..., the latter ..." refer to the previous sentence, and require a rewind.
With high-speed fiction listening, books with many characters become a challenge. Unless each character has a distinct voice, there simply isn't enough time to remember everyone's name. In such cases, I often create mental labels in place of names ("the smart girl", "the villain", "the sidekick").
Practice is everything
To illustrate the power of practice, I can listen to English (my second-third language) comfortably at 3x-4x, but I can listen to Ukrainian (my native language) comfortably only at 2x.
Hours of daily English consumption make a huge difference. There are many terms that I know only in English. Talking about computers in Ukrainian is very hard for me.
Tip: speed control over everything
Every HTML5 player can control the playback speed. Not every website exposes the control or lets you go very high, but the capability is there.
A browser extension like Video Speed Controller gives you the ultimate control - go as high as you want.
This works for YouTube, Microsoft Teams, Kaltura, vanilla HTML player, and most others.
Unexpectedly, this also helps with unskippable HR training and ads 😉.
Fun tip: speed up your music
You should absolutely try changing the speed of your favorite songs. It makes them feel different yet familiar - like you are listening to a remix.
There is a whole genre called nightcore that remixes your favorite pop songs at a higher speed and pitch.
Have thoughts? Leave a comment.
Opinions = my own.