More reading than hours? Listen to your university reading list instead
Eight items before Thursday. You will get through two properly, skim a third, and turn up hoping nobody asks you directly. That is not laziness, it is arithmetic — the list was never built around the number of hours in your week.
Upload your reading list.
Listen like an audiobook.
£2.99 a month, or $2.99. An hour of listening free every month to try it.
The reason you skim is time, not preference
Nobody actually wants the shortened version. You take it because eight items will not fit in the week, so you read the abstract and the conclusion and hope the middle was not where the argument lived.
Half an hour on the bus is a different proposition from half an hour at a desk you have not got. When the reading fits into time you were spending anyway, you get to hear the author's own sentences — the hedge in the discussion, the qualification in the limitations, the phrasing you will need when you quote it and someone asks where exactly she says that.
Where the hours come from
Not from anywhere new. From time already spent: the bus, the gym, the walk in, cooking, a lunch break. A journal article on PageListener runs about half an hour, so one journey each way takes an item off the list.
Upload on your laptop, shut it, carry on from your phone. It resumes at the exact second on whichever device you open next, screen locked, headphones on.
It suits prose. It does not suit equations
Works well
History, sociology, politics, law, philosophy, literature, education, business, most of psychology — anything that is mostly sentences. And the introduction and discussion of almost any paper, whatever the field.
Works badly
Equations, proofs, problem sheets, chemical notation, code and dense results tables. Read aloud, a formula is noise. Scanned or photographed pages have no text to read at all.
If your reading is mathematical, this is not your tool. If it is mathematical in places, the next part matters — because you can look at the table while the discussion carries on playing.
It also does not care what the PDF is. Your own notes, a chapter, a lecture handout, something you had an AI summarise or pull together across several papers — if it is a PDF with text in it, it gets read, and it still gets chapters.
You do not have to stop listening to check something
The page turns as it is read. The player shows the page being narrated, so you can see where you are, with a page stepper if you want to move through it yourself.
Open the PDF and the audio keeps playing. One button hands the document to your browser with everything you would expect — scroll, zoom, search. Zoom into the results table while the discussion plays over it. Go and find the figure the author just mentioned. Check which page a quotation sits on, because you will need that for the citation.
Or switch to follow-along, where the text scrolls like song lyrics with the current line lit. Reading and listening at once, which for difficult prose is often the easiest way through it.
The controls assume your attention will wander, because on a bus it will. Fifteen seconds back, thirty forward, chapters to jump between, and speeds from 0.9× to 1.5× — the slow end matters more than the fast one when the argument is dense.
What the free hour actually buys you. An hour a month is one or two papers — enough to find out whether this works on your own reading, not enough to get through a week of it.
A free account holds three documents. A reading list is longer than that, so Plus is where this works properly — unlimited uploads and unlimited listening.
Comparing tools? We wrote a comparison with Speechify, which does a great deal more than this and costs a great deal more.
Try it on Thursday's reading
Start with whatever is at the top of the list. Playback begins as soon as the first chapter is ready, and you will know within one journey whether this works for you.
A free account takes a moment, and your first document goes through whatever its length.