Do Audiobooks Count as Reading?

Here we go again...

NPR ran a story yesterday, a quick 2-minute story, or, depending on your perspective, if you’re a Missy-Elliott-called-out-1-minute-man, a marathon 2-minute session about whether listening to an audiobook “counts” as reading.

Which is a debate I’m sort of tired of, but let’s start with everyone else’s stupid, wrong opinions before we get to my slightly better, less wrong-er takes.

What Do The Polls Say?

According to the article, about 40% of American adults do not think “listening to audiobooks is a form of reading.”

Let’s unpack this a bit.

First, somewhere between 50% and 75% of adults read a book last year. So, I mean, if you didn’t read a book last year, in any fashion…maybe fuck off with your opinion on whether specific reading methods counts. This is like me weighing in on whether or not someone is a good, I don’t know, welder if they can only do MIG welding (I JUST looked this up, it’s apparently the easiest form, but don’t come at me on that, all you welders who read this shit).

Opinions are of questionable value, but opinions based on something people aren’t even engaging in are probably worse.

We also get this gem:

It's older people over age 65, it's men, and it's those without a four-year degree that are more likely to say that listening to audiobooks isn't a form of reading.

This don’t impress me at all, let alone “much.”

People 65+ only make up about 7% of audiobook listeners. With regard to gender, something like 25% of women listened to an audiobook in a given year, and 22% of men did the same. OR, something like 45% of men listened to one, and 55% of women did.

Education-wise, only 6% of people who didn’t finish high school reported listening to an audiobook in the last year.

So here are the issues I see with the people who responded in the negative:

1. Peoples’ behavior probably determines, to an extent, how they answer the poll. In other words, people who listen to audiobooks probably respond that it “counts.” Which isn’t a very fair way to examine the issue.

2. The answers to the poll, with the exception of the age discrepancy, seem to be somewhat reflective of readership, in general. Men read less than women, people with lower educational levels read less than those with more schoolin’. It seems to me that these answers really just end up reflecting the demographics of readership.

The Major Issue With the Poll

Here’s where some of my opinion starts to mingle, so get excited for that!

When presented the question about audiobooks and reading, in my opinion, it’s HEAVILY dependent on what we’re talking about.

If someone said, “Is listening to audiobooks a form of reading?”…I would probably say No. Not because I don’t value audio, but because I define “reading” more narrowly, as a specific activity.

Here’s Wikipedia’s definition:

Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of symbols, often specifically those of a written language, by means of sight or touch.

Here’s Cambridge Dictionary:

the skill or activity of getting information from books

You can see that Wikipedia’s definition doesn’t really accommodate audio, whereas Cambridge’s absolutely would.

So, while the poll asks a question meant to get at how people feel about audio, in terms of whether it “counts” as reading, it may just be a matter of definitions.

The question’s form also conflates two things that I think we mix up WAY too often in the book world:

Question 1: Is listening to an audiobook and reading a text book THE SAME?

Question 2: Is listening to an audiobook and reading a text book OF THE SAME VALUE TO THE READER?

Let’s come back to these questions in a moment.

The Brain Science

Guys, I have a neuroscientist in the family.

There have been times I’ve lamented that nobody in my family started a pizza place or a donut shop because, hey, free donuts, free pizza, but finally, for once, my family’s career choices are to my direct benefit!

I’ve been very suspicious of articles that say listening to audiobooks and reading print “light up the same parts of the brain.” What does that mean, exactly? Does that mean the same thing is happening? Is that how brains work? Why is my brain all folded? Is my brain…like, squishy?

I do not know much about brains.

So I asked my Neurosciensister:

Does the same region of the brain lighting up during two different activities mean that the same thing is happening in the brain? Like, is that a strong piece of evidence that reading and listening are equivalents?

If that doesn’t make sense because it’s too dumb to even be a question, let me know, I’ll try and be more specific!

And I got an answer, within like 12 hours. It was thorough and good, and like any good scientist would make sure of, it came with healthy skepticism (it’s always wellness influencers and charlatans who are completely, totally sure about this stuff).

Overall, it seems that fMRI is a useful tool for measuring brain activity, but it’s not perfect.

Here’s a bit I thought was interesting, about how looking at regions could be more or less awesome:

…[brain] region A could be involved in both auditory and reading. Region B could be audiobooks as only. Region C Could be reading only. So audiobooks = A+B and reading books = A+C and there’s no way of knowing if by being grouped with a second region, what that does to experience… region A might be fundamentally altered by region B also being activated. It might be multiplicative, not additive. It gets really complicated because the brain is controlled by huge circuits that don’t actually live neatly in one region which would fit into one voxel [think of this as a 3D pixel] on an imaging platform. Thus, the connectivity across multiple regions may be more informative but the fMRI science is still kinda working that out. There’s some challenges there…

And here’s the summary:

TLDR; no, you can’t say if the same region is firing for two tasks it’s definitively processing information in the same way. BUT if across many individuals the same area is continuously firing and thus had an increased BOLD [blood oxygen level dependent, this is the type of signal fMRI measures because a neuron that’s firing hard AF needs more oxygen, therefore demands more blood] signal regardless of modality and there’s other work which has previously implicated that region for a specific function, it’s good evidence that region is at least involved in a *similar* process for those two activities. Identical? Maybe not. But related? Pretty solid evidence.

But you gotta take that with a grain of salt cuz recalling a memory of a fart smell and recalling a memory of a rose smell could also elicit identical BOLD signals in your hippocampus, even if your experience of each different memory is quite unique.

I cannot tell you how immensely proud I am that this highly scientific email had a fart analogy. We are truly cut from the same cloth.

What does this mean?

Listening and reading are likely very, very similar, based on the best tools we have available and the level of reasonableness involved in inserting a probe into someone’s brain in order to figure out whether reading and listening to audiobooks is identical (low. SUPER low).

But “similar” doesn’t mean “the same.”

When Audio Totally Counts

The NPR article pivots to another study that found listening and reading comprehension were nearly identical. In other words, people who listened to the audiobook retained as much as people who read in print.

So, for most uses, audiobooks would put a listener in the same end place as a reader.

Here’s my opinion:

Absolutely! Audiobooks “count.”

If you’re in a book club, if you have to read a book for work, and especially if you’re reading a book for information, to learn something, understand something, or to hear the plot, OR if you’re reading just for funsies, audiobooks, it seems, from a scientific perspective, totally count!

When Audio Doesn’t Count

There’s one scenario in which I don’t think audio is parallel, where it doesn’t count, and that’s the scenario in which someone is trying to work on the specific skill of reading.

And the same study about comprehension backs me up! Vindicated, like Dashboard Confessional, at last!

Additionally:

Rogowsky's done some further research looking at school-aged kids and learning styles and found that self-described auditory learners scored worse on comprehension rates across the board. That is, they did worse understanding and recalling information that they read and listened to.

ROGOWSKY: That really leads you to believe that when you are learning to read, you really need to have the experience reading. When we tailor to a student's learning style and we're just giving them auditory formats, we are not reinforcing the reading skills that are so essential to becoming a proficient reader.

Reading, as in looking at or touching text and interpreting that into words and sentences, is a specific skill that is, seemingly, somewhat distinct from the listening. And it would seem that reading print/text might be an important component of developing audio-based comprehension.

Allow Me an Analogy:

If I was your strength and conditioning coach (because you’ve made a terrible, terrible set of life choices), and you were a basketball player, there are things I could help you with that would make you a better basketball player.

I could help you with your conditioning so that, by the last period, you weren’t dying out on the court. I could help you with strength training, which would likely help you stave off injury.

But when it comes to shooting 3’s, you would need to practice shooting 3’s. You would need specific instruction on shooting 3’s. Unless the problem you had with 3’s was specifically related to the amount of force you were able to generate being so low that you weren’t able to shoot the ball far enough, you need specificity, not general conditioning.

Strength and conditioning will make you a better overall basketball player, but you can’t squat your way to not sucking at shooting 3’s.

With regards to reading, if you need or want to read, and your reading comprehension level is already good, generally, audiobooks would seem to fit the bill just fine.

If what you need, however, is to be good at the specific skill of reading text on a page, I’m not sure audiobooks alone are going to get you there.

Let’s Talk As Adults

Fartpoopiefartfart.

Okay, that’s out of my system, let’s be adults.

In terms of people learning the specific skill of reading, which I think is absolutely essential and should be developed by anyone with the ability to do so, audiobooks do not count.

However, nobody is suggesting that kids shouldn’t bother to learn to read in school, and when it comes to adults who cannot read but have the mental/physical ability to do so, I don’t think we’re really talking about them, either.

I think, when we’re having this debate, what we’re really talking about is the person who comes to your book club, says they “read” the book, but they listened to the audio. Or the person who says they “read” a lot, but you find out *gasp* they’re mostly listening to the audiobooks.

If you’re an adult, and if your reading skills are good to great, they don’t necessarily need work, I don’t think there’s any harm in going with audiobooks. If you prefer them, if they work for you, why the fuck not?

For those of you who prefer to read, just know that I, a real librarian, don’t see any reason to give other adults shit for opting for the audio as opposed to the text. I mean, c’mon. Life is hard enough. Do we really need to downgrade the enjoyment of others? Can’t they have this ONE thing without others shitting all over it?

I think the research, the best information available to us today, supports the idea that audiobooks serve a similar function to reading text. Maybe not identical, and maybe not in some specific situations (as a writer, I find that reading text is an essential skill), but for the most part, I don’t think we need to worry.

I think that in the cultural sense, audiobooks keep people involved and engaged in the world of books. I think they expose people to ideas, narratives, ways of talking and writing, and so on.

More than anything, though, I think audiobooks let people experience books even if they are, honestly, too fucking busy to read. And that’s a real, legit problem.

If you work 40 hours a week, if you have an average American commute, which comes out to about an hour a day of driving, you’ve got maybe 4 hours a day outside of your work obligations. And that doesn’t include cooking, cleaning, vacuuming, and god forbid, taking care of children, those unending parasites who constantly mock your devotion to them by reminding you constantly that they will live on long after you’re dead and probably see some really awesome movies that you can’t even comprehend.

4 hours a day ain’t much.

If only you could somehow read while also, I don’t know, getting in the daily recommended 30 minutes of exercise, cooking meals that conform to reasonable dietary guidelines, doing the bare minimum, legally obligated tasks that prevent the city from ticketing you for not mowing the “parkway,” that 14” inches of grass between the street and the sidewalk that you cannot turn into xeriscaped space, but also are responsible for—if you can read while doing those things, fuck me, why not?

Let’s bring it home, back to our two original questions:

Question 1: Is listening to an audiobook and reading a text book THE SAME?

No. I still say No. It’s objectively not “the same.”

Question 2: Is listening to an audiobook and reading a text book OF THE SAME VALUE TO THE READER?

Yes. Outside of some very narrow circumstances, yes it is.

And just to put the ol’ M. Night Shaymalan on this, let’s twist in a last question:

Can someone who listens to the audiobook call what they’re doing “reading?”

Yes.

If you care about someone calling a thing reading when, to you, it’s not technically reading, you are caring WAY too much about what other people are doing.