Even the most avid book lovers understand a common truth: Reading takes time. It requires you to stop what you’re doing and concentrate on the task at hand. Audiobooks, however, can slip more easily into the daily rhythm, serving as a soundtrack to studying, driving, and working. We spoke with seven people who have benefitted from audiobooks on the job. Here are their stories:
On a busy week driving his rig and training another truck driver, Anthony Leech might traverse 4,000 miles and work 14 hours a day. To break up the monotony, he listens to audiobooks. "I am a documentary buff. Ken Burns is one of my favorites. I've listened to every war documentary he's got," he says.
Leech works for TMC Transportation, hauling just about anything a flatbed truck will carry: shingles, lumber, sheet rock -- you name it. He's been with the company 16 years and has been to every state in the Lower 48. Sometimes, he'll tailor the audiobook to the route he's on. He's listened to a history book about the Civil War while driving past famous battlegrounds in Tennessee. And when he passed Meteor Crater -- an enormous depression 550 feet deep caused by a meteor near Winslow, Ariz. -- he searched online and found a book about the crater that clued him into its history, preservation, and future.
Sandy Koropp is so busy selling books for a living at her bookshop, Prairie Path Books in Wheaton, Ill., that she's left with little time to actually sit down and read. So the majority of her "reading" is done by listening. In fact, she consumed her favorite book of the year, so far -- Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman -- on audio.
Koropp says she listens to books constantly -- while driving to work, on the treadmill, while doing chores. Usually, she's popping back and forth among four different works and listens for up to four hours a day, playing the books at a faster speed so she can zip through them. She says listening helps her in two ways: She can decide whether she wants to purchase particular books for the store, and she's able to talk about those books to customers looking for reading recommendations. "It just implants more in my head when I've heard it, as opposed to reading the book jacket."
Valery Behr's teenage son, Hunter, is an ardent reader. So much so that she couldn't get him to stop reading at night.
"I'm probably the only mom on the planet that has to yell at their child to stop reading," says Behr, who works remotely so that her schedule allows flexibility for parenting. "There will be times where, after 30 minutes of prompts, I've had to pull a book out of my son's hands because he won't go to bed," she says.
Hunter has been diagnosed with autism-spectrum disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other learning challenges -- but reading has never been one of them. With Behr's son's constant and intense focus on books, she was concerned for his vision and the fact that he simply wouldn't go to sleep. So she decided to try something new: audiobooks.
"One day, I just got tired of struggling to get him to put a book down before bed. So I bought him a Rick Riordan," she says. "I set the sleep timer on the Audible app and when it stops, he knows it's time to go to bed. No more arguments." Now that he's listening to audiobooks, he seems to get fewer headaches and he settles in to bed more easily. With fewer arguments and less stress, Behr's job is easier. "Sometimes I even sit with him while he listens because he wants me to hear a passage that he thinks is funny," she says. "That helps us to bond, as well."
Husband-wife artist team Gary Lockwood (aka Freehand Profit) and Betsy VanDeusen love listening to audiobooks while creating (he makes one-of-a-kind masks out of highly coveted sneakers and she's a multimedia artist with a focus on hummingbirds, cakes, and mermaids). "Betsy really got me hooked on listening to audiobooks while we work," says Lockwood. "Life only seems to get busier and busier, but it's important to keep up with your education and search for new inspirations. I can't exactly read while I'm making masks, but having someone like Neil Gaiman reading us a story while we are in the studio is a pretty fantastic substitute," he says. Right now, he's listening to Gaiman's Norse Mythology and VanDeusen is listening to The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood./nBoth agree that what they're listening to impacts their art, feeding their creativity in both conscious and subconscious ways.
Were it not for audiobooks, Elise de Somer isn't sure she would have been able to continue as a literature major at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Ind. Last fall, de Somer was in a car crash and suffered a concussion that left her unable to read. "My eyes wouldn't go side to side," she says.
When her doctor ordered two weeks of bedrest with no reading, her world was shaken. "I wasn't even supposed to read social media," she says. "So reading Jane Austen for three hours in a row probably was not allowed."
She came up with a solution: listening to her literature homework. The method, she found, enriched the story, adding texture and nuance to the characters and plot. When tuning into books such as Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, de Somer says she felt more immersed in the time and place -- Nigeria in the 1960s -- as she listened to the African pronunciations and intonations. "I feel like it's more authentic, because you get narrators that are narrating with the accent of the actual characters," she says.
In May, she graduated as class valedictorian, majoring in literature and studio art with a minor in English writing. As she applies for marketing jobs and works as a freelance photographer, she's still listening to audiobooks."I can read with no problems," she says. "But I still prefer audiobooks."
Husband-and-wife team Roshni Agarwal and Jeff Allen recently co-founded a vacation-planning business called The Vacation Hunt, where they plan a mystery trip tailored to a customer's interests. Leading up to the getaway, they email the travelers clues and post hints on social media, and often those tips are inspired by books the co-founders listened to. "We try to come up with plot points or obscure references to places in books that are also tied to our secret destination," says Allen.
Agarwal says books are a regular source for the clues because they make for a better challenge. "We don't want people to just be able to Google it," she says. "And it's harder to Google a plot point if you don't even realize it's from a book."
A recent example: Allen and Agarwal planned a surprise trip for a customer to Hawaii. The customers selected the trip length, budget, shared their interests and some other information thenlet The Vacation Hunt do the rest. Leading up to the trip, Allen says he started sending clues to the couple. One clue came from the David Mitchell novel Cloud Atlas.
"There's a character named Zachry, and he's in a post-apocalyptic Hawaii, so the clue we came up with is 'This is the place where Zachary lived after the Fall,'" says Allen (the couple says name was misspelled intentionally to make it harder to decode).
Derek Peters spends long hours working solo, both at his desk and on the road for his work as a photographic marketing content specialist. He discovered that listening to audiobooks helps pass the time, and makes him feel less isolated. It’s as though a friend — right now, Jim Dale — is telling him a story in the form of Peter and the Secret of Rundoon by Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry (it’s part of a series that serves as a prequel to the tale of Peter Pan). Peters says it’s taken him some time and practice to be able to master the art of working and listening to audiobooks, but it’s been a worthy learning curve. In fact, he found that some audiobooks — such as Harry Potter, a series he’s listened to four times — are so good that he tends to continue working longer than expected, just to hear more of the book. He figured that if he finds inspiration in audiobooks, others might, too, so he created a site to recommend books for people who are working, called Audio Books at Work, where he posts reviews and rates books and series. “Audiobooks make a marked improvement on my life, and especially my work life,” he says. With his site, he’s giving back and sharing his own suggestions in hopes that others will feel the same.