And if you keep reading (at whatever speed), you get to the actual point of the article:

>So I tried slowing down even more, and discovered something. I slowed to a pace that felt almost absurd, treating each sentence as though it might be a particularly important one. I gave each one maybe triple the usual time and attention, ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of pages to go.

That to me, feels opposite the the article's advice.

And I too, often watch youtube at 1.5x or 2x speed, and dislike audiobooks because I read so much faster that I can possibly listen to them, and there's always an ever growing list/pile of books I want to read after this one. I wonder if that's why a certain type of movie works so well for me - I think of them as "movies made from short stories, not novels", and now I'm wondering if it's something similar to the OP's idea - and that spending 2 hours watching a short story I'd expect to read in 15/20mins is what I'm enjoying, in a different way to, say, the new Dune movies - which so far have been 4-5 hours watching a couple of big novel's worth of story that'd take me a week or so to read? Just writing that out now, I realised theres a two orders of magnitude difference in speed there going from 1/10th of reading speed to 10x reading speed - from a 15 minute read to 2 hour watch, to a week long read to 4-5 hour watch. Hardly surprising they hit my brain differently.

It isn't just how fast or slow it is. Reading at a slow pace gives you time to think in a way that is flexible from sentence to sentence.

To borrow the same analogy from the article, image trying to savor a meal where someone else was deciding when you take each bite. Even at a slow pace, the rigidness of the pace and your lack of fine control would still pose a problem with giving each bite it's rightful consideration.

That being said I love audio books and think I would struggle to apply this article's advice in my own life. Slowing down your audiobook is still a step in that direction, though I sometimes find that slowing it down can cause my mind to wander and my comprehension goes down and not up.

> Then just use 0.75 or 0.5x speed?

I think this often sounds unsettling (like the reader is drunk or otherwise impaired), and anyway the listener doesn't need more time to recognise each individual word -- they want time to take in sentences and paragraphs.

Interesting how in your second paragraph you do exactly the thing you said not to do in your first.

For me, "overindulgent and annoying" is way too harsh. But they feel _sooooo_ slow and I kind of resent "missing out" on the other books I could have read while the audiobook plods along (even at chipmunk 2x babble speed).