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 have a problem with audiobooks, but they’re very clearly not reading; in the same way that watching the news is not reading the newspaper.
On a skills level, you’re not practicing the act of looking at glyphs and words and translating them into meaning. This is important to practice, because it’s actually really hard, especially if the book uses complicated or rare words. Humans have to learn this skill, it’s not innate. You also don’t learn new words via audiobook; you assume the reader hiccupped and move on.
On the activity level, you can’t consume the book at your own pace. For most people, it becomes a “passive” activity instead of an active one, so you rarely retain the information; especially if you’re multitasking or using it as background noise to drown out your thoughts. Most people don’t sit quietly and pay attention to every word, I find they have it on as white noise while distracted. You may as well put on music instead.
The audiobook reader also decides for you what voices characters have, and in a way, dictates the personality of every character. That’s an opportunity loss in practicing creativity and imagination.
I think it’s great that stories are reaching so many more people via audiobook. But they’re not a book, they’re a reading; in the same way that if you read a book to a kid, you don’t say that they’ve read the book.
This sentiment has been repeated a couple times in this thread but I’m not sure where it comes from as it’s entirely false.
For most people, it becomes a “passive” activity instead of an active one, so you rarely retain the information
This is worded as an established fact despite the fact that this has been studied in the past and disproven entirely.
On a skills level, you’re not practicing the act of looking at glyphs and words and translating them into meaning.
This is the only thing with any truth to it. You’re right that in order to get better at the ability of visually reading something, you have to practice this step of decoding written words into meaning, but I also don’t think it’s relevant at all to the core process of “reading”. Once the decoding step is over, whether it’s visual or auditory, all the actual comprehension and processing that your brain does is identical.
I’ve seen people listen to audiobooks. When I ask them, they can’t even tell me what happened in the last 5 minutes. So it cannot be disproven entirely, because I’ve seen it happen multiple times. What studies are you referring to?
I’ve seen people read books. When I ask them, they can’t even tell me what happened in the last 5 minutes, and in some cases, can’t recall a single significant detail of what they read throughout the entire book. So from an unverified anecdotal standpoint I think it’s a wash.
However there have been dozens of studies on this topic over the last 70 years. One of the more significant recent studies was This one where they looked at brain scans of people reading and listening to audiobooks and found that the brain activity between the two different kinds of readers was the same, down to the specific region of the brain.
The most comprehensive meta-analysis of these studies found that there was no reliable difference in comprehension or retention between the modes of reading, which proves both our anecdotes are just statistical outliers and not indicative of any real innate difference.