Okay. In this comment I’ll keep an updated list of audiobooks I’ve heard since Sept. 2013, for those who are interested. All audiobooks are available via iTunes/Audible unless otherwise noted.
Open the .epub in Sigil, merge all the contained HTML files into a single HTML file (select the files, right-click, Merge). Open the Source view for the big HTML file.
Edit the source so that the ebook begins with the title and author, then jumps right into the foreword or preface or first chapter, and ends with the end of the last chapter or epilogue. (Cut out any table of contents, list of figures, list of tables, appendices, index, bibliography, and endnotes.)
Remove footnotes if easy to do so, using Sigil’s Regex find-and-replace (remember to use Minimal Match so you don’t delete too much!). Click through several instances of the Find command to make sure it’s going to properly cut out only the footnotes, before you click “Replace All.”
(Ignore italics here; it’s added erroneously by LW.) Use find and replace to add [[slnc_1000]] at the end of every paragraph; Mac’s text-to-speech engine interprets this as a slight pause, which aids in comprehension when I’m listening to the audiobook. Usually this just means replacing every instance of with [[slnc_1000]]
Copy/paste that entire HTML file into a text file and save it as .html. Open this in your browser, Select All, right-click and choose Services → Add to iTunes as Spoken Track. (I think “Ava” is the best voice; you’ll have to add this voice by upgrading to Mavericks and adding Ava under System Preferences → Dictation and Speech.) This will take a while, and might even throw up an error even though the track will continue being created and will succeed.
Now, sync this text-to-speech audiobook to some audio player that can play at 2x or 3x speed, and listen away.
To de-DRM your Audible audiobooks, just use Tune4Mac.
Roose, Young Money. Too focused on a few individuals for my taste, but still has some interesting content. (my clips)
Hofstadter & Sander, Surfaces and Essences. Probably a fine book, but I was only interested enough to read the first and last chapters.
Taleb, AntiFragile. Learned some from it, but it’s kinda wrong much of the time. (my clips)
Acemoglu & Robinson, Why Nations Fail. Lots of handy examples, but too much of “our simple theory explains everything.” (my clips)
Byrne, The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III (available here). Gave up on it; too much theory, not enough story. (my clips)
Drexler, Radical Abundance. Gave up on it; too sanitized and basic.
Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies. Gave up on it; too slow in pace and flowery in language for me.
Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order. Gave up on it; the author is more keen on name-dropping theorists than on tracking down data.
Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (available here). Gave up on it. There are some actual data in chs. 5-7, but the argument is too weak and unclear for my taste.
Tuchman, The Proud Tower. Gave up on it after a couple chapters. Nothing wrong with it, it just wasn’t dense enough in the kind of learning I’m trying to do.
Foer, Eating Animals. I listened to this not to learn, but to shift my emotions. But it was too slow-moving, so I didn’t finish it.
Caro, The Power Broker. This might end up under “outstanding” if I ever finish it. For now, I’ve put this one on hold because it’s very long and not as highly targeted at the useful learning I want to be doing right now than some other books.
Rutherfurd, Sarum. This is the furthest I’ve gotten into any fiction book for the past 5 years at least, including HPMoR. I think it’s giving my system 1 an education into what life was like in the historical eras it covers, without getting bogged down in deep characterization, complex plotting, or ornate environmental description. But I’ve put it on hold for now because it is incredibly long.
Diamond, Collapse. I listened to several chapters, but it seemed to be mostly about environmental decline, which doesn’t interest me much, so I stopped listening.
Bowler & Morus, Making Modern Science (available here) (my clips). A decent history of modern science but not focused enough on what I wanted to learn, so I gave up.
Brynjolfsson & McAfee, The Second Machine Age (my clips). Their earlier, shorter Race Against the Machine contained the core arguments; this book expands the material in order to explain things to a lay audience. As with Why Nations Fail, I have too many quibbles with this book’s argument to put this book in the ‘Liked’ category.
Clery, A Piece of the Sun. Nothing wrong with it, I just wasn’t learning the type of things I was hoping to learn, so I stopped about half way through.
Schuman, The Miracle. Fairly interesting, but not quite dense enough in the kind of stuff I’m hoping to learn these days.
Conway & Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt. Fairly interesting, but not dense enough in the kind of things I’m hoping to learn.
Thanks! Your first 3 are not my cup of tea, but I’ll keep looking through the top 1000 list. For now, I am listening to MaddAddam, the last part of Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic fantasy trilogy, which qrnyf jvgu bar zna qvfnccbvagrq jvgu uvf pbagrzcbenel fbpvrgl ervairagvat naq ercbchyngvat gur rnegu jvgu orggre crbcyr ur qrfvtarq uvzfrys. She also has some very good non-fiction, like her Massey lecture on debt, which I warmly recommend.
When I was just starting out in September 2013, I realized that vanishingly few of the books I wanted to read were available as audiobooks, so it didn’t make sense for me to search Audible for titles I wanted to read: the answer was basically always “no.” So instead I browsed through the top 2000 best-selling unabridged non-fiction audiobooks on Audible, added a bunch of stuff to my wishlist, and then scrolled through the wishlist later and purchased the ones I most wanted to listen to.
These days, I have a better sense of what kind of books have a good chance of being recorded as audiobooks, so I sometimes do search for specific titles on Audible.
Some books that I really wanted to listen to are available in ebook but not audiobook, so I used this process to turn them into audiobooks. That only barely works, sometimes. I have to play text-to-speech audiobooks at a lower speed to understand them, and it’s harder for my brain to stay engaged as I’m listening, especially when I’m tired. I might give up on that process, I’m not sure.
Most but not all of the books are selected because I expect them to have lots of case studies in “how the world works,” specifically with regard to policy-making, power relations, scientific research, and technological development. This is definitely true for e.g. Command and Control, The Quest, Wired for War, Life at the Speed of Light, Enemies, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Chaos, Legacy of Ashes, Coal, The Secret Sentry, Dirty Wars, The Way of the Knife, The Big Short, Worst-Case Scenarios, The Information, and The Idea Factory.
I definitely found out something similar. I’ve come to believe that most ‘popular science’, ‘popular history’ etc books are on audible, but almost anything with equations or code is not.
The ‘great courses’ have been quite fantastic for me for learning about the social sciences. I found out about those recently.
Occasionally I try podcasts for very niche topics (recent Rails updates, for instance), but have found them to be rather uninteresting in comparison to full books and courses.
Okay. In this comment I’ll keep an updated list of audiobooks I’ve heard since Sept. 2013, for those who are interested. All audiobooks are available via iTunes/Audible unless otherwise noted.
Outstanding:
Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment
Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (my clips)
Schlosser, Command and Control (my clips)
Yergin, The Quest (my clips)
Osnos, Age of Ambition (my clips)
Worthwhile if you care about the subject matter:
Singer, Wired for War (my clips)
Feinstein, The Shadow World (my clips)
Venter, Life at the Speed of Light (my clips)
Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly (my clips)
Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (my clips)
Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (available here) (my clips)
Gleick, Chaos (my clips)
Wiener, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (my clips)
Freese, Coal: A Human History (my clips)
Aid, The Secret Sentry (my clips)
Scahill, Dirty Wars (my clips)
Patterson, Dark Pools (my clips)
Lieberman, The Story of the Human Body
Pentland, Social Physics (my clips)
Okasha, Philosophy of Science: VSI
Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife (my clips)
Ferguson, The Ascent of Money (my clips)
Lewis, The Big Short (my clips)
de Mesquita & Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook (my clips)
Sunstein, Worst-Case Scenarios (available here) (my clips)
Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From (my clips)
Harford, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back (my clips)
Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter (my clips)
Hawkins & Blakeslee, On Intelligence
Gleick, The Information (my clips)
Gleick, Isaac Newton
Greene, Moral Tribes
Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (my clips)
Sabin, The Bet (my clips)
Watts, Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer (my clips)
Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (my clips)
Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
Dennett, Freedom Evolves
Kaufman, The First 20 Hours
Gertner, The Idea Factory (my clips)
Olen, Pound Foolish
McArdle, The Up Side of Down
Rhodes, Twilight of the Bombs (my clips)
Isaacson, Steve Jobs (my clips)
Priest & Arkin, Top Secret America (my clips)
Ayres, Super Crunchers (my clips)
Lewis, Flash Boys (my clips)
Dartnell, The Knowledge (my clips)
Cowen, The Great Stagnation
Lewis, The New New Thing (my clips)
McCray, The Visioneers (my clips)
Jackall, Moral Mazes (my clips)
Langewiesche, The Atomic Bazaar
Ariely, The Honest Truth about Dishonesty (my clips)
A process for turning ebooks into audiobooks for personal use, at least on Mac:
Rip the Kindle ebook to non-DRMed .epub with Calibre and Apprentice Alf.
Open the .epub in Sigil, merge all the contained HTML files into a single HTML file (select the files, right-click, Merge). Open the Source view for the big HTML file.
Edit the source so that the ebook begins with the title and author, then jumps right into the foreword or preface or first chapter, and ends with the end of the last chapter or epilogue. (Cut out any table of contents, list of figures, list of tables, appendices, index, bibliography, and endnotes.)
Remove footnotes if easy to do so, using Sigil’s Regex find-and-replace (remember to use Minimal Match so you don’t delete too much!). Click through several instances of the Find command to make sure it’s going to properly cut out only the footnotes, before you click “Replace All.”
(Ignore italics here; it’s added erroneously by LW.) Use find and replace to add [[slnc_1000]] at the end of every paragraph; Mac’s text-to-speech engine interprets this as a slight pause, which aids in comprehension when I’m listening to the audiobook. Usually this just means replacing every instance of with [[slnc_1000]]
Copy/paste that entire HTML file into a text file and save it as .html. Open this in your browser, Select All, right-click and choose Services → Add to iTunes as Spoken Track. (I think “Ava” is the best voice; you’ll have to add this voice by upgrading to Mavericks and adding Ava under System Preferences → Dictation and Speech.) This will take a while, and might even throw up an error even though the track will continue being created and will succeed.
Now, sync this text-to-speech audiobook to some audio player that can play at 2x or 3x speed, and listen away.
To de-DRM your Audible audiobooks, just use Tune4Mac.
VoiceDream for iPhone does a very fine job of text-to-speech; it also syncs your pocket bookmarks and can read epub files.
Other:
Roose, Young Money. Too focused on a few individuals for my taste, but still has some interesting content. (my clips)
Hofstadter & Sander, Surfaces and Essences. Probably a fine book, but I was only interested enough to read the first and last chapters.
Taleb, AntiFragile. Learned some from it, but it’s kinda wrong much of the time. (my clips)
Acemoglu & Robinson, Why Nations Fail. Lots of handy examples, but too much of “our simple theory explains everything.” (my clips)
Byrne, The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III (available here). Gave up on it; too much theory, not enough story. (my clips)
Drexler, Radical Abundance. Gave up on it; too sanitized and basic.
Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies. Gave up on it; too slow in pace and flowery in language for me.
Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order. Gave up on it; the author is more keen on name-dropping theorists than on tracking down data.
Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (available here). Gave up on it. There are some actual data in chs. 5-7, but the argument is too weak and unclear for my taste.
Tuchman, The Proud Tower. Gave up on it after a couple chapters. Nothing wrong with it, it just wasn’t dense enough in the kind of learning I’m trying to do.
Foer, Eating Animals. I listened to this not to learn, but to shift my emotions. But it was too slow-moving, so I didn’t finish it.
Caro, The Power Broker. This might end up under “outstanding” if I ever finish it. For now, I’ve put this one on hold because it’s very long and not as highly targeted at the useful learning I want to be doing right now than some other books.
Rutherfurd, Sarum. This is the furthest I’ve gotten into any fiction book for the past 5 years at least, including HPMoR. I think it’s giving my system 1 an education into what life was like in the historical eras it covers, without getting bogged down in deep characterization, complex plotting, or ornate environmental description. But I’ve put it on hold for now because it is incredibly long.
Diamond, Collapse. I listened to several chapters, but it seemed to be mostly about environmental decline, which doesn’t interest me much, so I stopped listening.
Bowler & Morus, Making Modern Science (available here) (my clips). A decent history of modern science but not focused enough on what I wanted to learn, so I gave up.
Brynjolfsson & McAfee, The Second Machine Age (my clips). Their earlier, shorter Race Against the Machine contained the core arguments; this book expands the material in order to explain things to a lay audience. As with Why Nations Fail, I have too many quibbles with this book’s argument to put this book in the ‘Liked’ category.
Clery, A Piece of the Sun. Nothing wrong with it, I just wasn’t learning the type of things I was hoping to learn, so I stopped about half way through.
Schuman, The Miracle. Fairly interesting, but not quite dense enough in the kind of stuff I’m hoping to learn these days.
Conway & Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt. Fairly interesting, but not dense enough in the kind of things I’m hoping to learn.
Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Wessel, Red Ink
Levitt & Dubner, Think Like a Freak (my clips)
Gladwell, David and Goliath (my clips)
Thanks! Your first 3 are not my cup of tea, but I’ll keep looking through the top 1000 list. For now, I am listening to MaddAddam, the last part of Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic fantasy trilogy, which qrnyf jvgu bar zna qvfnccbvagrq jvgu uvf pbagrzcbenel fbpvrgl ervairagvat naq ercbchyngvat gur rnegu jvgu orggre crbcyr ur qrfvtarq uvzfrys. She also has some very good non-fiction, like her Massey lecture on debt, which I warmly recommend.
Could you say a bit about your audiobook selection process?
When I was just starting out in September 2013, I realized that vanishingly few of the books I wanted to read were available as audiobooks, so it didn’t make sense for me to search Audible for titles I wanted to read: the answer was basically always “no.” So instead I browsed through the top 2000 best-selling unabridged non-fiction audiobooks on Audible, added a bunch of stuff to my wishlist, and then scrolled through the wishlist later and purchased the ones I most wanted to listen to.
These days, I have a better sense of what kind of books have a good chance of being recorded as audiobooks, so I sometimes do search for specific titles on Audible.
Some books that I really wanted to listen to are available in ebook but not audiobook, so I used this process to turn them into audiobooks. That only barely works, sometimes. I have to play text-to-speech audiobooks at a lower speed to understand them, and it’s harder for my brain to stay engaged as I’m listening, especially when I’m tired. I might give up on that process, I’m not sure.
Most but not all of the books are selected because I expect them to have lots of case studies in “how the world works,” specifically with regard to policy-making, power relations, scientific research, and technological development. This is definitely true for e.g. Command and Control, The Quest, Wired for War, Life at the Speed of Light, Enemies, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Chaos, Legacy of Ashes, Coal, The Secret Sentry, Dirty Wars, The Way of the Knife, The Big Short, Worst-Case Scenarios, The Information, and The Idea Factory.
I definitely found out something similar. I’ve come to believe that most ‘popular science’, ‘popular history’ etc books are on audible, but almost anything with equations or code is not.
The ‘great courses’ have been quite fantastic for me for learning about the social sciences. I found out about those recently.
Occasionally I try podcasts for very niche topics (recent Rails updates, for instance), but have found them to be rather uninteresting in comparison to full books and courses.
Thanks!