I love audiobooks and consume them frequently but I personally don’t call it reading. It doesn’t feel like the same activity to me. What do you think?
Reading a long book is just a matter of how much free time one has. Its not really an impressive accomplishment, however if you struggle at reading I could see it being a goal of sorts for yourself.
writing a book would be a recognizable feat. Writing a great book is a big accomplishment.
That said, if youre comparing, reading the book to me is better for comprehension than listening but thats different for us all.
Bonus points for doing both simultaneously.
I don’t know how much of an accomplishment reading a very long work of fiction is but if the reader and the listener ended up with similar levels of comprehension I’d say that reading and listening are the same.
A lot of people have already weighed in, but allow me to give my opinion as a blind person very familiar with debates about what media a work is consumed in.
Most blind people today do not know braille and rely on text to speech to consume written material if they can’t use magnification. Braille is bulky. A braille bible takes up a shelf, and an encyclopedia (I was shocked to learn they exist) takes up an entire wall or more.
Braille is also expensive. A Perkins brailler, a typewriter used for writing braille, is north of $600 last I checked, and a refreshable braille display, a text terminal for reading computer output, costs at least $1500, and usually double that.
Last, braille is slow. I’ve heard conflicting claims about top reading speeds, but it seems the absolute peak just about hits the lower bound of a literate print reader.
Taking all these points together, it can be easy to see why many argue braille is dead. Audio in the form of text to speech is easier to produce, faster to consume, and only requires software.
Where this intersects with the question at hand, whether listening is the same as reading, is that reading braille activates the same regions of the brain as reading print, while audio does not.
Having said all that, I primarily use audio via text to speech for long texts, and magnification for shorter stuff. Braille was my first literacy medium, but my school pivoted to print when I was in third grade because I was struggling. Braille can be a tactile sensory nightmare if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing, and I absolutely am. It also involves more physical movement, of the hands and arms, compared to reading with the eyes. I do still try to read braille now and then, but I’m painfully slow. Currently working my way through The Hobbit, and can only manage a page or two per session.
If two people are standing in front of me, one read the book, the other listened to it, if both of those people know what happened in the book and can discuss it with comprehension, I’d be unable to tell which one read and which one listened. So, does it really matter? Seems like a distinction without a difference to me.
Ingesting information is ingesting information. For most of human history stories were oral tradition rather than written. Accessibility is also a factor. Not everyone can physically read, nor can everyone listen to an audiobook or podcast. Both are valid options.
I’m impressed by anyone who can get through heavy, old literature without falling asleep no matter which format they choose though lol
I agree with all you say.
For most of human history we also used the word read to describe one form of decoding and use other words for others. I’m trying to understand the seems to be changing or in dispute lately.
heavy old literature isn’t information. it’s imagination.
probably why you find it so boring. because it’s not reductive transmission, it’s experiential and in order to understand if you have to put effort into it rather than simple ingest it.
it’s like saying cooking is the same as eating because it’s just nutrients, and what’s the point, just drink soylent.
I understand where you’re coming from and that’s a valid take.
For me it’s the time period and to a degree a resulting language barrier for certain pieces. Dostoyevsky for me, (I know W&P is Tolstoy, bear with me) was understandable but hard to bear with because he wrote like loved ones I have who have serious mental struggles. A lot of Russian culture and literature is similarly toned. Ralph Waldo Emerson came across to me as self-righteous. And Tolkien, though he’s a fantastic author, writes with heavy visual description which I can’t process well due to aphantasia.
Although, I loved Frankenstein and begrudgingly, also Jane Eyre. I also got a kick out of Chaucer. Every few years I’ll re-read Little Women. I also adore learning factual information.
I think most of it comes down to a variation in personal perspective/preference AND whether you’re critically engaging with the material you’re taking in. Hell, the Barbie movie can be thoughtfully critiqued. I’ve known folks who wrote doctorates on specific video games.
I’d argue the “cooking vs. eating” would be more comparable to “reading vs. writing,” though, no? Cooking ends with material output. Maybe “eating and savoring a meal vs. mindlessly downing a bag of chips.”
One of my kid’s schools had a wild debate about this for their yearly charity “Readathon.” The kids get sponsors to sign up to pledge the amount of money they will donate for each book the kid reads during the readathon. Parents are expected to sign off that their kid really did the reading for all the books they put on their sheet. Other than that its on the honor system. They’ve been doing it for 60+ years.
The kids don’t get any prizes but they do get certificates of recognition for various levels of achievement. It came up this year, that some parents count audiobooks and others don’t. They have been doing it like this for ome years now but it was never discussed before. The rules don’t say anything about audiobooks but they were written back when audiobooks weren’t common.
We had some seriously intense discussions in the Parents Charter (the name for our PTA) and lots of people have strong feelings about this! In the end the agreement was that transparency is best so the form has been updated with one side for audiobooks and one side for books. For purpose of donation they are counted the same.
This is one area where I think the distinction is actually important!
For kids, they’re learning to read. Heavy, repeated practice decoding and interpreting printed characters is the point.
Ultimately the activity of reading changes as you get older, into receiving new information and perspectives. At that point an audiobook is pretty much at parity. But earlier on in elementary and even middle grades, kids really need the actual reading IMO.
I have a relative who vastly prefers audiobooks. But his wife has to keep reminding him, don’t let their daughter take that shortcut. She has to actually learn to read (and read well) first.
I agree and for my kids that is the rule.
This is a tricky one. I’ve already posted a comment that may seem VERY contradictory to this one, but in this case, I think the kids should actually be reading.
The point of the readathon (aside from fundraising) is to get kids to practice reading, not to consume as much media as possible. Kids are already really good at that.
It would be like the band teacher allowing kids to listen to someone playing the trumpet instead of practicing themselves.
I see it like jogging and cycling. Both good ways to get exercise, both good for you, and both can get you to the same place, but in the end they are two different ways to do it and each has its own advantages and disadvantages.
That’s how I always think about it too. Imagine telling someone “I jogged all the way to the store”. Assuming it’s more than a mile away, that might be a little surprising. If the person then says, “well I biked, but same point, I got there”, it’s a slightly different reaction. “I jogged” and “I biked” are two different things with different meanings.
Not that it should be looked down on or it’s bad at all.
I guess there’s a gap in the language a bit. There’s not a great sounding word (afaik) to indicate ‘consuming a book in whatever format’, so it’s understandable that ‘read’ evolves into that. Still, in most cases to me it makes more sense to choose between ‘read’ and ‘listened’.
Imagine getting mad at the organizers when they tell you, ‘no you can’t use your bike in our jogging race’.
I feel like there’s an analytical factor that comes with reading that doesn’t quite translate as effectively with audiobooks. Yes you can listen to a story on audiobook and understand the subtext and that’s great. But when you really want to pause and sit with a passage and ponder it further, or you’re trying to really dig into the way it’s constructed, I find that easier with a written page. It’s not impossible with an audiobook, just strikes me as maybe a little clunkier.
On the other hand, a good audio book reading can put emphasis on parts that don’t always leap out while reading, improving comprehension. Reading to my kiddo was a completely different experience than reading or listening because I paid more attention to contextual clues than I would have normally.
It does have different benefits for each method, and they even vary from peraon to person and some people benefit more from audio and other visual!
Humans were telling stories to each other orally, way before they’d ever started writing those stories down. If you ask me, audiobooks are just an extension of that history. That doesn’t mean I think audiobooks are a superior format for reading, but it’s not an inferior one either.
As far as audiobooks go, this isn’t really much of a thing anymore, but the only important caveat I’d make is abridged books versus the whole thing. If you want to read a story, read the whole damn story. But that’s just equivalent to skimming through or looking up cliff notes for a hard copy.
I think reading is inherently “better” as it forces you to sit down and focus on a single task to the exclusion of everything else. This is not the case with audiobooks as you can be doing other stuff at the same time. If you actually just sit down and listen then I no longer see hardly any difference there. However listening to a audiobook while doing other stuff means your attention by definition is not 100% in the book so it’s not the same thing. It’s like watching a TV serie while browsing social media on your phone.
It is not reading. It’s listening. But whatever profound insights or wonderful stories are in the text will be in your head after either activity.
Not sure why reading or listening to a book would be an accomplishment, but let’s assume it is. Then my opinion is reading it would be the greater accomplishent because It takes more effort to read than listen.
because it takes effort.
not everyone reads purely for pleasure/entertainment. most folks do, sure, but that’s why War and Peace isn’t a breach read. It’s a book that often has an entire semester dedicated to it in a college curriculum.
just like there is a massive difference between a stroll in the park for 30m and trying to get a 5K runtime under 30m.
The main difference I see is that when a professional wants to read something very thoroughly, they employ techniques of what’s called slow reading. That’s usually when the highlighter comes out along with note-taking materials.
This is possible with print information because of how much of it is put in front of your eyes at once. Rereading a paragraph, even a half dozen times to guarantee you fully understood it, is very easy with print. It is not with audio. Flipping back to page xxx to check something, also very easy with print and less so with audio. Smoothly speeding up/slowing down your rate of consumption to match the complexity of the current topic, also easier with text than audio. Etc etc.
So, for casual consumption, they’re fairly equivalent and both fine. But if you wanted to claim mastery of a complex topic after putting years of intensive effort in, I’d say that probably required some reading that could not have been replaced by listening, and if you did no reading, I’m going to be a little doubtful of your mastery of the knowledge. It’s possible to still understand what you need to, of course, but you definitely neglected what is usually the most efficient, reliable method by far.
Good thing is that this doesn’t really get to be an opinion. Well, I guess anything can be an opinion, but this one is objectively wrong if you differentiate them.
There have been several studies done on this, and brain scans show that physically reading with your eyes and listening to an audiobook trigger the exact same responses in the brain. They have the exact same effect, and your brain comprehends them the exact same.
Studies back in the 80s showed a direct correlation in listening comprehension and reading comprehension. They’re directly linked. In the 70s, studies showed that college students that listened to a short story could summarize it with equal accuracy to those that read it.
The science is pretty clear, physically reading a story and listening to it are the exact same and require the same amount of effort and attention to walk away with a good comprehension of the material.
This is accurate as far as it goes. There are differences in natural performance that disappear with with constraints.
There is no difference with simple material under any conditions. As the material becomes more complex, reading has superior comprehension for natural conditions. This is because readers will speed up or slow down as the material dictates, but listeners don’t usually have or use that control. Readers will also hop back and read difficult passages a second or third time, again something that listeners can’t/don’t.
If you constrain readers by forcing them to read at a fixed pace without review then the differences become minimal again.
So there are definitely differences, but they are tied to the performance characteristics of the medium rather than a cognitive difference.
Listening to the audiobook is the same as reading if you are actively listening. When it comes to Russian writing, I am skeptical that you are fully absorbing the information just passively listening to it. But if you feel that you are, then it’s reading.
Yeah, this was my thought.
Listening to a Harry Potter audiobook? Exact same as reading. No difference.
But with something like War and Peace, I feel like it’s too easy to just zone out throughout.
Though I think that the reason I feel that way might be less about the density of the material, and more about the implied motivations.
If you listen to a Harry Potter audiobook, I assume it’s because you want to hear the story. But even in the question as posed, it feels like you’re reading War and Peace just so you can claim to be the kind of person who read War and Peace. It’s clout chasing, not reading the book for it’s own sake.
Which, to be clear, isn’t a bad thing. I’ve read books just to say I did. But, it makes doing it as an audiobook a bit more sus, as it means you could just basically fall asleep while it’s playing and still “get the clout,” if you wanted to.
But, as you say, if you actively engaged with it, I certainly don’t see a problem.
Not to mention, you can read a 1000 page harry potter book in like 3-4 hours. the language is very simple, it’s written for 8 year olds.
war and peace will take you closer to 30. no 8 year old is reading War and Peace.
I don’t know any Russian. It is entirely opaque to me. What is it about Russian writing that is different?
To be clear, I’m not assuming he’s reading it in Russian. It’s just that the famous ones that are published in English are very wordy. Long sentences, and the development of the ideas is long, complex, and not laid out straight like a typical hollywood story or simpler novel. They need to be thought about and discussed. Russian naming conventions also often confuse English readers, because they use multiple different names to refer to the same character.
Thanks. That makes sense.
Reading it is a far greater accomplishment, it requires intention and dedication. You can give that to an audiobook, of course, but can also listen to it while playing call of duty and say that you finished it.
I think there’s some wiggle room here. A lot of neurodivergent folks quite literally can’t focus on reading, and being able to do something else while listening to a book can actually help with retention for those folks.
Yes, in that wiggle room there is space for those folks that you’re talking about, in a way I feel a bit included. Then there’s those that have them as a background noise machine and feel that they’ve read the book.
To second-screen watch a movie as is the same as to watch a movie?
That cuts equally both ways. You could skim through a book without slowing down to intently focus on every single sentence and that would be functionally the same as drifting your attention in and out while listening to an audiobook.
