GeekNotes: Business Learning, iPods and the Spoken Word

Today, a colleague of mine wrote to ask about making the best business use of his new iPod. It’s a great question, and applies equally to people who have purchased the iPhone, or any other portable media player. While this article is aimed at personal use by the busy executive, consider that many corporations and universities are using iPods to deliver training and communications with great success.

Ann and I have purchased over 200 audiobooks since 2003, a mix of business, non-fiction, fiction and instructional material. I have also tried a variety of podcasts and instructional videos, and have experimented with recording meetings with iPod microphone accessories. Beyond work, our entire family is into audiobooks. We have – no lie – SAVED summer holidays with the right selection of family-friendly audiobooks to while away the highway miles.

Ease of use and balance of features are keys to the iPod’s market success. We use iTunes to sync our library of media to our iPods. This setup is simple, elegant, and available on both our Mac and Windows computers. If you have another brand of media player, or are using Windows Media Player, the concepts should still apply.

Here are a few thoughts:

iPods are great for multitasking, but audiobooks, podcasts, and video all take more focus.

We listen to audiobooks when we can control interruptions for 15 or more minutes at a time. It’s easy to pause music, or even pop out the earbuds without a worry about your “place”. Not so with audiobooks. You don’t want to lose your place, or miss anything, so interruptions are awkward as you try to be polite while pulling out of the universe of the book and fumbling for the pause button. So we save the audiobooks for exercising, mowing the lawn, in-flight, walking the dog, or our regular three-hour drives to Indianapolis to visit family.

Video on my little iPod Nano is surprisingly sharp, but it requires my full, seated attention. I have instructional videos loaded, but don’t often have the occasion to watch them. If you fly much, or your commute involves public transit, video blogs may work better for you.

There is no shortage of material – but the narrator and the writing can make or break the experience.

If you are reading Harry Potter novels, you know J. K. Rowling, but if you are listening to books you come to know and love the voicings of narrator, Jim Dale. While I love and recommend the writings of business consultant, Ram Charan, I fatigue when he narrates his own material. Some books come alive in your hands – Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” comes to mind – but flop when read aloud. Ann had to stop listening to a lovely book narrated by actor, Brendan Fraser, because she couldn’t reconcile the book’s content with her images of Fraser’s cartoonish Tarzan character from Disney’s “George of the Jungle”!

Almost all audio storefronts let you listen to a sample from the audio production. Make sure you can handle the narrator’s voice for 5 to 20 hours.

Watch out for abridged versions.

Audiobooks come in Unabridged and Abridged versions. Ann and I almost ALWAYS get unabridged versions of fiction. I accidentally bought and listened to an abridged version of “The DaVinci Code”, by Dan Brown – spoiled it for me. With his next book, I was extra-careful to select, “Angels and Demons (unabridged)”. Abridged versions of business books are usually okay.

iPods since the ‘mini’ can play Audiobooks faster or slower than normal.

Why would you change the speed?

• FASTER (For flying through business books – they CAN be dry, yes?),
• NORMAL (for fiction and listening to the incredible narrators,) and
• SLOWER (for note-taking or language study, I guess – I’ve never had occasion to use it).

The neat trick is that this doesn’t drive the voice pitch up to ‘chipmonk’ (Sorry, Alvin!) To set audiobook play speed on an iPod, choose Settings > Audiobooks and choose a speed. Setting the play speed affects audiobooks purchased from the iTunes Store or audible.com, or files converted to .aa or .m4b formats.

There are LIFETIMES of audiobook, podcast and spoken word media available.

Our favorite sources:

• Audiobooks: we subscribe to Audible.com. The iTunes Music Store also carries the Audible.com inventory, and has a few exclusives, but an Audible.com subscription is much more affordable.
• Podcasts: including free content, we use the iTunes Music Store. Great podcasts include David Maister’s business master class; CBC Radio 3 – new Canadian artists, eh?; BBC, PRI, PBS and NPR productions; Newspaper and newsmagazine blogs, including WSJ, NYT, WIRED, Globe & Mail…
• Instructional Media and Lectures: Apple collaborates with universities to present “iTunes U“. Much of the content is free, and the calibre of the lecturers is, well, genius.

iPods can be high quality RECORDING devices, too.

Need an audio recording of a presentation or meeting? There are a host of microphone accessories that turn your iPod into a stereo digital recorder. Read all about it at iLounge.com.

These are simply starting points. Go to your favorite websites and publications and poke around for podcasts you can subscribe to, directly, or through other storefronts. And while there’s plenty good for your business brain here, treat yourself to some of the amazing best selling fiction and incredible narration available, in every genre, both at the iTunes Music Store and Audible.com. Happy multitasking!