Does listening to audio books count as “reading”? A roundup of views

I keep seeing this question pop up on a regular basis on social media, and people have strong feelings in favor of one direction or the other. I never listened to books much, but my children have fallen in love with audio books, especially for long car rides. Also, as an author, I was intrigued to discover that both my books have been popular in audio format. So, the audio book revolution is probably here to stay, whatever people think of it. But is this kind of book consumption good for us? Should we worry about all these people who are opting increasingly more for listening to their books?

Here are a few insightful longer reflections on this subject.

1. James Tate Hill for Literary Hub: “Do Audio Books Count as Reading?” After a diagnosis of Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy at age sixteen—which amounted to going blind practically overnight—Tate Hill transformed from a lukewarm book reader to a dedicated audio book listener. His experience is a reminder of the wonderful service that audio books offer to people with disabilities. A taste from his argument:

Over the years, people have asked if I noticed a difference between books on tape and reading print, and the answer is I don’t know. Sporadic reader that I had been, it was hard to say if the words read with my ears reached my brain differently from everything I had read with my eyes. For every study that shows comparably complex brain activity during both methods of reading, there’s a respected author or critic who discredits audio books as shortcuts or cheating. In The Guttenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts suggests listening to a book shares more with the act of watching television than reading print, and given my own seamless transition from watching TV with my ears to reading talking books, I’m in no position to refute his comparison.

What I know for sure is this: Sooner or later, the voice in my ears ceases to be a voice. It becomes the words, the words become sentences, and the sentences become the story. At some point, the voice in my ears merges with my own voice the way the words on a page once became my own inner voice when I still read print. This happens less consciously, perhaps not even literally, when listening to professional narrators. Other times, with the less polished volunteers who recorded my textbooks or, years later, the digital voice of screen-reading software, the translation to an inner voice is more conscious.

2. Writing for Time, Markham Heid surveyed some research in exploring this question: “Are Audiobooks As Good for You as Reading?”

“I was a fan of audiobooks, but I always viewed them as cheating,” says Beth Rogowsky, an associate professor of education at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.

For a 2016 study, Rogowsky put her assumptions to the test. One group in her study listened to sections of Unbroken, a nonfiction book about World War II by Laura Hillenbrand, while a second group read the same parts on an e-reader. She included a third group that both read and listened at the same time. Afterward, everyone took a quiz designed to measure how well they had absorbed the material. “We found no significant differences in comprehension between reading, listening, or reading and listening simultaneously,” Rogowsky says.

Score one for audiobooks? Maybe. But Rogowsky’s study used e-readers rather than traditional print books, and there’s some evidence that reading on a screen reduces learning and comprehension compared to reading from printed text. So it’s possible that, had her study pitted traditional books against audiobooks, old-school reading might have come out on top.

If you’re wondering why printed books may be better than screen-based reading, it may have to do with your inability to gauge where you are in an electronic book. 

Another study in the same essay had the opposite conclusion:

Daniel coauthored a 2010 study that found students who listened to a podcast lesson performed worse on a comprehension quiz than students who read the same lesson on paper. “And the podcast group did a lot worse, not a little worse,” he says. Compared to the readers, the listeners scored an average of 28% lower on the quiz—about the difference between an A or a D grade, he says.

Interestingly, at the start of the experiment, almost all the students wanted to be in the podcast group. “But then right before I gave them the quiz, I asked them again which group they would want to be in, and most of them had changed their minds—they wanted to be in the reading group,” Daniel says. “They knew they hadn’t learned as much.”

Part of the issue has to do with HOW people listen vs. read. You can’t multitask while reading on paper, but you can while listening. This may affect how much you retain. In other words, this isn’t just a reading vs. listening! One can listen well or poorly–and that makes a difference.

3. Writing for Discover Magazine, Jennifer Walter surveys the brain science for her piece: “Audio Books or Reading? To Our Brains, It Doesn’t Matter”:

Looking at the brain scans and data analysis, the researchers saw that the stories stimulated the same cognitive and emotional areas, regardless of their medium. It’s adding to our understanding of how our brains give semantic meaning to the squiggly letters and bursts of sound that make up our communication.

The focus in this essay is specifically on stories. But so much of nonfiction writing is not quite precisely story-driven.

4. Over at New York Times, Daniel Willingham, a psychologist who is a reading researcher, gives a more nuanced answer: both are good, and they’re just different: “Is Listening to a Book the Same Thing as Reading It?” A taste from his argument:

Audiobook sales have doubled in the last five years while print and e-book sales are flat. These trends might lead us to fear that audiobooks will do to reading what keyboarding has done to handwriting — rendered it a skill that seems quaint and whose value is open to debate. But examining how we read and how we listen shows that each is best suited to different purposes, and neither is superior.

In fact, they overlap considerably. Consider why audiobooks are a good workaround for people with dyslexia: They allow listeners to get the meaning while skirting the work of decoding, that is, the translation of print on the page to words in the mind. Although decoding is serious work for beginning readers, it’s automatic by high school, and no more effortful or error prone than listening. Once you’ve identified the words (whether by listening or reading), the same mental process comprehends the sentences and paragraphs they form.

Writing is less than 6,000 years old, insufficient time for the evolution of specialized mental processes devoted to reading. We use the mental mechanism that evolved to understand oral language to support the comprehension of written language. Indeed, research shows that adults get nearly identical scores on a reading test if they listen to the passages instead of reading them.

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Really, my own thought as a Classicist/ancient historian is: Many civilizations had beautiful literature that was composed and transmitted orally long before they had writing. Are you going to tell me that the early Greek epics, like Iliad and Odyssey are not literature? Or the epic of Medieval Mali, Sundjata, which was told by bards for centuries, but was not even written down until the 1980s?

Just because we associate literature with writing—and reading—doesn’t mean everyone always did. That is indeed the point that Willingham gets into in his piece above. Literature used to be recited—and listened to. In our moment of decline in literacy, we’d be better off if people who otherwise don’t read books actually listened to them. Sure, reading on paper is different from listening. But so is listening to Shakespeare performed live in theater as opposed to reading his plays.

Indeed, I see the fruit of listening to books in my six-year-old daughter, who discovered audio books as a four-year-old. We do a lot of reading aloud of books at home anyway, but with the addition of audio books to her regiment, she has been able to listen to a lot more children’s classics. Her attention span has grown, and in conversations, I see remarkable comprehension and retention from these books.

After all, most kids do not reach a comfortable reading facility and speed until slightly older than her age. A six-year-old can thoroughly enjoy (to use the example of a family favorite) Mr. Popper’s Penguins. She cannot sit down and read it on her own, however. Anyway, writing up these quick reflections was made possible by the audio book she is listening to right now.