📚Reading
I love reading fantasy & scifi books and occasionally other stuff as well. I use Goodreads to keep track of the books I've read or want to read. In 2021 I'm planning to read at least 21 books.
When I say reading I'm also including listening to audiobooks, which is something I also enjoy very much while doing other activities. I mainly use audible.com or for other downloaded media my Plex server and an iOS app called Prologue. Plex and Prologue are a great combination because they're essentially a self-hosted version of Audible, complete with having streaming access to all my own media and being able to download them onto the device when desired.
Discovery
Discovering new books to read is always tricky, so here's a few good resources:
Goodbooks.io: Book recommendations by famous, successful people, e.g Elon Musk or Ali Abdaal.
Esquire 50 best fantasy books of all time: Not sure if I agree with the premise but the list has a good amount of lesser known/newer fantasy books on it as well.. so it's a good resource if you're already through the typical western authors & classics.
Ebooks
Utilities
WebToEpub (Chrome Extension): Used to download and convert web serials such as "The Wandering Inn" to a epub file which can be read on common ebook readers.
How to use
Install the Chrome Extension: WebToEpub
Visit the "Table of contents" page on the wandering inn website.
Click on the little puzzle icon in the top right corner of the browser and launch WebToEpub while you are on the "Table of contents" page.
You can now add some metadata and a book cover image if you want. Then select the chapters you want to include in the book. I typically create one epub file per book. So I'd include all chapters from 1.00 to Interlude for the first book.
Under advanced options there are some more options, but be sure to not include images otherwise the book files will be huge.
When you are ready click
Pack ePuband the epub will be created and downloaded to your machine. You can then e.g. use Calibre to import the book in your eReader.
Calibre: eBook management software that can be extended with plugins. Useful to convert ebooks from various formats into the format needed for a specific ebook reader.
O'Reilly ePub Downloader (Chrome Extension): Used to download O'Reilly eBooks as ePub so they can be read on a Kindle or similar eReader. Very useful if you have a O'Reilly subscription through your workplace or school.
ePub to Audiobook Conversion: It's now possible to use AI TTS tools like OpenAI whisper or Azure Cognition TTS to convert entire text books to audiobooks easily. Sadly it's not super cheap yet. Converting an entire wandering inn book at around 7-8M characters in HD would cost 210$. With the non-hd model this cost can be cut in half.
Eleven Labs Reader: iOS app that can read from text, url, pdf or ePub documents with various narration voices. Works amazingly well with a very high quality narration that feels like it’s from a professional audiobook narrator.
Blogs
WaitButWhy?: Interesting blogs posts about society, psychology, space, the future and various other topics. Written by Tim Urban
Free audiobooks
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