Steve Pavlina has an interesting post on using Windows Media Player to help you speedread audiobooks. I personally think that this is a brilliant idea as you can listen to 90 minutes of audio in about 60 minutes using this method, and it really won’t affect the quality of the recording.

There’s a radio station in my area that uses a similar technique to speed up songs so they can claim that they play more songs per hour than any other local station.  It’s noticeable once you’re aware of it, but most people don’t care — so it’s a great idea to try it with audiobooks. My only caution is to make sure that you’re paying attention to the audio and not doing other things, as it’s possible you might miss something.