A Pragmatic Approach To Choosing A Format For Reading

If you're a voracious reader, it's worth creating a framework for choosing a format for reading books. Here's the framework I use, feel free to copy/pasta and change as much as you'd like!

Format Options

There are 3 formats:

• Paperback/Hardcover (physical/visual)
• eBook (digital/visual)
• Audio Book (digital/auditory)

I've found that it's best to pick each format based on three criteria:

• the genre of the book
• planned level of focus
• likelihood of taking notes/highlighting

Paperback/Hardcover Books (Physical)

• Genre: technical (specifically w/ code samples/diagrams) in nature, "evergreen" personal growth, "essentials list" books
• Planned Focus: Deep
• Likelihood of Taking Notes/Highlighting: Strong
• Pros: easy highlighting, easy bookmarking, consistent formatting, easy sharing
• Cons: physical nature makes it harder to carry more than a few and requires physical storage space

eBook

• Genre: personal growth, business, fiction
• Planned Focus: Deep to Shallow
• Likelihood of Taking Notes/Highlighting: Strong
• Pros: portable, scalable, highlighting saved online, instant gratification on purchase
• Cons: dependency on device battery life, limited consistent formatting, harder to search than paperback

Note: It's important to address why I don't like to read technical books as eBooks:

code samples and diagrams are often crafted with the physical copy of a book in mind, not eBooks.

If you've ever read a technical book on an eBook, you've likely found that diagrams don't scale properly (often even bleeding off the page or being so incredibly small you need a reading loop to make sense of it) and that code samples don't fit on the page properly or worse extend off the page and can't be read.

Audio Books

• Genre: fiction, non-fiction requiring no action
• Planned Focus: Shallow
• Likelihood of Taking Notes/Highlighting: Unlikely
• Pros: portable, scalable, passive, multi-taskable
• Cons: dependency on device battery life, highlighting non-existent or kludgy, hard to focus, impossible to "search" for keywords or quotes

Almost exclusively fiction. The only time I generally listen to audio books is when I'm doing something else that requires attention but isn't deep work. For example:

• driving long distances (anything more than 20 minutes)
• walking the dogs
• doing yard work
• grocery shopping

I can listen to a fiction and pay attention while also "fully" tending to the other task I'm doing without feeling the need to concentrate or worse, hearing something I want to highlight or write down because it resonated with me.

I hope that this approach has at the very least given you a sense of how to pick formats of books yourself and at best given you a framework to figure your out your own approach. Happy reading!