Listening while I read

I’ve always found the idea of listening to a book while you read it to be very interesting, and my recent conversation with Chris Gardner helped bring that back to the surface.

However, I came across a surprisingly difficult problem: how do you actually do it?

Chris uses Kindle + Audible, which is the most common solution. However, this has two major problems:

Next, I looked around at other common reading apps such as Apple Books, Kobo, Nook and others, but none really did it. You essentially can on Apple with the “buy it twice” method, but that didn’t really help. Plus, Apple keeps their books very locked down, so there would be no way to ever read them elsewhere if I wanted to.

Speechify?

I thought I had found the answer with Speechify. You can upload any book to it, and then it uses AI to read the book and it does a fantastic job! However, it had two problems:

• It can be tricky to load your books on there, which I’ll talk more about in a moment.
• They removed their “bookmark/highlight/note” feature, so there is no way to note important parts of a book while you’re reading/listening. You’d need a third-party app (or paper) to take notes off to the side. That could be ok sometimes, but problematic at others.

Also, Speechify is a little pricy ($29/mo), but you’d save more than that amount by avoiding the “double purchase” of every book, so that wasn’t necessarily a deal-breaker.