Funny story, I didn’t plan to write on this topic, but something happened to me on Tuesday, 6th of September, 2021, and I decided to write on this. My classmates and I were given a review to work on by our professor for missing his class on Monday, 7th of September, 2021.
Although it was kind of a misunderstanding between us and our professor, we had to pay the price for that by reviewing a 58 pages book due for submission on the 20th of September 2021. My classmates and I didn’t even find this assignment funny at all, coupled with the fact that other materials had dropped before the review, and also a lot of us still have our projects to work on. I am not a fan of reading big Archaeology books, I began to think how else do I want to read this book. The thought came to me, audiobooks!. This would be my perfect solution to preparing my review.
I remembered my good audio reader for books AI reader, and I said to myself this is perfect. I converted my PDF to a word document because my AI reader works with a word document.
Then I put my already converted book in the AI reader to commence reading, then boom!, my AI reader couldn’t work for that particular book. I became sad, my solution just became a problem again. I didn’t know how to even start crying. I had to ask my classmates for a good audio reader app for books and I got some recommendations from them. A thought came to my mind which is why you are reading this now, I am not the only student looking for an easier way to read voluminous materials and pass, what solutions are available to read these voluminous materials? could audiobooks be the new normal for students? should lecturers embrace and recommend audiobooks for students for teaching?. All these questions kept rolling through my head and audiobooks have their usefulness to students which I will explain to you as you follow me. Let’s ride.
What are audiobooks?. This is a recording of a book or magazine read aloud. We are in the digital age and many trends are coming up every day that is making life easier for us. Audiobooks are a perfect example of the improvement in technology and it is considered essential for students. In this digital age, the attention span of people has tended to decrease over the years. A recent study by Microsoft concluded that the human attention span has dropped to eight seconds – shrinking nearly 25% in just a few years.
There is also a popular saying that Nigerians don’t read and if you want to keep something and you do not want the average Nigerian to know, just put it in a book. Since the attention span and reading culture is decreasing, people who still love to read and have a lot to cover, and still have busy schedules opt for audiobooks instead. This means for a student with voluminous books to read and a lot of distractions from social media, the best solution will be the audio reading of books.
Audiobooks can be seen as a good productivity tool for students because you can listen to a book and be doing other things like cleaning, walking for instance. It helps to save time when you are reading. It also helps in building your vocabulary and pronunciation as a student because you are listening to how the narrator is pronouncing each word. Analysis, critical thinking, and judgment are all part of critical listening. Audiobooks are an excellent approach to improve your critical listening abilities. Analyzing various problems in the story’s plots and attempting to make specific conclusions based on your analysis will help you improve these skills. It helps to improve focus and memory too.
Gradually, people are beginning to embrace audiobooks more as seen in these statistics for the USA: An estimated 131 million people listened to an audiobook in 2021, which is about 46% of the total 12+ U.S. population and a 1% increase compared to 2020. Even though the number of people commuting plummeted in 2020, audiobook revenue was up more than 17% compared to 2019. The audiobook market size, measured by revenue, is $1.3 billion in 2021. The market size is expected to increase by 5.5% in 2021.
You being overwhelmed as a student with a lot of books to read, assignments to submit, other engagements are calling your name aloud too, adopting an audiobook style will be the best option for you to cover grounds in your reading. You just need a set time, listening ears, your earpods, and a good audiobook and viola! reading made easy. Lecturers too can incorporate audiobooks into their teaching to improve reading culture among their students. If you are yet to jump on the audiobook train, I will encourage you now to do so. I will recommend Voice, Microsoft Edge, and AI reader to begin with. Happy listening, Happy reading.
AASA PRESS UI 