Do books have to be “read”?

Do you know the Romance of The Three Kingdoms? Nonsense, how may not know, this but one of the four famous books of China, no matter peach garden, or burning red cliff, no matter three English war Lv Bu, or thousands of miles walk alone ride, which scene is not the classic in everyone’s mind, that can be said to be nobody knows, nobody does not know. But have you really read Romance of The Three Kingdoms?

My Three Kingdoms began with Mr. Yuan Kuocheng’s pingshu. At noon when I was a child, the home of the old man to listen to the romance of The Three Kingdoms, I will speak with listen to a day, the mood ups and downs with the fate of the three characters, just like that, I know that the three countries in the classical figures, the classic events of the three, for liu’s closing mourned by three brothers, cursed cao cao shameless, as well as the department horse family finally unified world shocked (and yes, This is my initial understanding of The Three Kingdoms.

I haven’t read the romance of The Three Kingdoms for a long time, but that doesn’t prevent me from having a preliminary understanding of the romance of The Three Kingdoms. I’m not going to be an expert on The Three Kingdoms anyway. I believe that many people, like me, already knew the stories of The Three Kingdoms before getting the book romance of The Three Kingdoms. I relied on pingshu when I was young, and My son relied on Uncle Kai telling Stories.

In my book Why Don’t You Read Enough? It is said that learning is only one of the purposes for which we read books. Another purpose is to obtain information. Do we really “read” books for information purposes?

“Read” books, based on technology

In our common impression, reading is to pick up a book and look through it word by word with your eyes. With the advancement of technology, the biggest difference between reading a book today and before is whether you pick up a paper book or an e-book, but the core is to “see” the past with your eyes.

In our cognition, reading is a word, book, should be used to “read”. But what we don’t really think about is that the assumption of “reading” books is based on certain technologies, such as the way we’re used to getting information visually, the way books are presented on paper, and so on. This foundation has been in place for thousands of years, so much so that we don’t know it every day, but technology is evolving.

Interaction with books, one of the biggest advances in technology over the years, is listening to books.

The value of words on the Internet is self-evident. From obtaining information to expressing opinions, many people have long been accustomed to using words to express themselves. The value of video is also very obvious today, from long video to short video, today has occupied a lot of people’s time. No matter text or video, they need to use people’s eyes, so both of these two media need to occupy people’s attention, which is also the focus of a lot of APP efforts.

But there is another medium that has been neglected for a long time: audio. The biggest advantage of audio is that it can not occupy people’s attention too much, and can be used to listen to fragments of time, such as walking, running, commuting and other scenes. It’s just that audio has always been underutilized compared to text and video.

When we think of audio, our first reaction is music. Music is really important, but if there is only music, the form is too simple. In fact, people have been exploring audio for a long time, such as podcasts. But podcasting was born a little early. In the PC era, when people sat in front of computers, their attention was occupied, and audio had no particular advantage over text and video. It wasn’t until the age of the mobile Internet that the advantages of audio became apparent. So, we see the rise of platforms like Ximalaya and Deli.

Audio has its advantages, and books also have a large inventory. If the two can be combined, there should be a wonderful chemical reaction, which should meet the needs of information-seeking reading. But that didn’t happen for a long time. Because the stock of books is too large, relying on people to record the audio one by one, the cycle will be too long to meet the needs of the market.

The combination of audio and books, there is a technical way to go, is the machine’s voice reading. But the thought of words being read aloud by a machine is likely to make many of us feel physically ill, and indeed it was years ago. The good news, however, is that the path of technology can always be improved, until it becomes usable. Now, the way to read by voice is almost open.

The book is ready to listen

Thanks to the development of technology over the years, spoken reading has made great progress. The first thing that made me feel able to listen to was wechat reading.

Given that I am familiar with the unbearable sound of voice reading, I was shocked when I heard the voice reading on wechat. You can still hear it spoken, but it’s definitely improved to an acceptable level.

Later, due to my work, I had the opportunity to know the evaluation of some domestic companies on the audio reading track. Overall, the field has made great strides and many companies have reached an acceptable level of spoken reading. However, in the combination of technology and product practicality, wechat reading is really in the front, such a high evaluation, especially from the company competing products.

Also because of this discovery, I tried to listen to some books, and I found that it satisfied my need for information very well. Some of their own unfamiliar field of books, want to read the need to brave, which is very painful. By listening, I simply listened, followed the flow of information along the way, and quickly immersed myself in the context of the book without requiring so much attention, which greatly reduced the cost of access to a book.

Listening, as mentioned earlier, can make the most of fragmented time. Through these fragments of time, I have had the opportunity to see the full picture of some otherwise troublesome tomes.

It is estimated that many people, like me, also found that wechat reading can listen to, choose to “listen to” the book. And the team of Wechat Reading also discovered this trend, so we have the opportunity to see the birth of wechat Reading’s sister product: Wechat Listening to books.

Today, listening to books has become an important way for me to “read” books, and I am constantly trying to optimize my listening experience.

How can I listen to books

I have to admit that voice reading is better than voice reading anyway, so if there’s an audio version of a book, I prefer it. Because from the voice, we can hear the reader’s feelings, which is not voice reading.

At present, more and more books have their own voice reading versions. For example, many books published by China Citic and Dreader have voice reading versions, and even some new books have voice reading versions. So, to listen to the book can first look for a corresponding version of the voice read aloud.

Do not think that the voice reading, like an announcer in reading, now a lot of voice reading do well, pay attention to the user experience, and even feel like listening to pingshu. For example, the book “Glory and Dream” made me hear the feeling of the American version of “Romance of The Three Kingdoms”.

Another feature of listening to books is that they can be played at double speed. We know that human speech is slow compared to the speed at which human beings receive information. Someone once did an experiment, using 1.2 times the speed of playback, most people can not hear it, so you can at least listen to the book at 1.2 times the speed. If you’re used to 1.2 times speed, you probably won’t think it’s a big deal to switch to 1.5 times speed. Then you’ll probably evolve to listen twice as fast, which will make you listen much faster.

As a matter of fact, I am now listening to books at twice the speed, which is not my fault. It only shows that voice, as an information transmission tool, has a lot of room for optimization. I know people who listen at three times the speed, but the difference is a self-training process. Of course, if you listen to something twice as fast in one go, it might feel fast at first, but the human brain is powerful, and after a while, you’ll get used to it.

Speaking of double-speed listening, I also found that when double-speed listening is used, spoken reading sounds more like spoken reading. I guess at about 2x speed, they both get a little bit distorted, so it actually makes them sound a little bit closer.

One of the interesting features of listening technology today is that you can choose different voices to make it sound like different people are telling you the story.

Wechat reading currently only provides male and female voices, two flatly light voices. If the same book is available, I currently choose the e-book that I can hear, because one of them is a version of Luo Pang. With this version, listening to a book is like listening to an episode of Luji thinking, and the feeling will be better.

summary

Are you still reading books? Listening has increasingly become my primary means of obtaining information. Some people get sleepy when they read. Listen to them. Walk on the road, not with eyes staring at the book, might as well listen to the book; If you want to close your eyes, listen to a book.

Today, listening has become my primary means of “reading” books, and if there’s a downside, it’s that some books don’t support spoken reading, not because of technical reasons, but because of copyright restrictions.

Technology is developing, The Times are progressing, we should not live up to the gift of The Times. Idle boring, listen to the book!