Contra Philip Harker on Audiobooks.
Audiobooks are not Reading.
The Google definition of reading is:
The activity or skill of looking at and comprehending the meaning of written or printed matter by interpreting the characters or symbols of which it is composed.
I can actually accept that audiobooks are reading according to the spirit of this definition. However, I do not accept that audiobooks are Reading. At this point I should clarify that my thesis is really that audiobooks are, in a vast majority of cases, inferior to regular reading, in all of the important ways that we care about when talking about reading. However, this does not make for a catchy title and thus “Audiobooks are not Reading” will remain as it is.
What do we gain from reading?
I claim that in most cases, listening to an audiobook is inferior to regular reading for accomplishing the goals of reading; so much so, that I wouldn’t consider it reading.
Again, my argument is not that in every single case audiobooks are inferior to regular reading (in fact, there is probably an equivalence between reading and listening in the brain, at least to some extent, but I haven’t done too much research on it. I’m vaguely aware that there’s an academic argument that humans were able to develop writing precisely because it re-uses the parts of our brains that exist for processing spoken language, which itself might have developed that capacity from our motor control circuits). My argument is that in the vast majority of circumstances, audiobooks are inferior to regular reading, and thus should not really be considered reading. When I tell someone that I have read something, I’m trying to communicate that I have taken the time to sit with the material and have struggled to understand it to the best of my ability. I claim that listening to an audiobook does not meet this standard.
Here are some of the arguments for why audiobooks are reading, and my response to them. Some are taken from Philip’s Reddit Thread.
People who think audiobooks aren’t reading are gatekeepers
Fuck yeah. Gatekeeping is awesome. I think we need more gatekeepers, actually.
I’m not dignifying this with an actual response because it’s not a real argument.
Blind people need audiobooks to read. “Its classist/racist/ableist to gatekeep ‘real reading’”.
Firstly, if you actually sat down to read a book instead of only listening to audiobooks, you’d know the difference between “its” and “it’s”.
Secondly, I guarantee you, literally nobody arguing that audiobooks aren’t legitimate reading is talking about blind people. Obviously, for a blind person, audiobooks are reading. There is no alternative.
Also, more on this point. If you sat down in a quiet area with no distractions, and focused 100% of your attention on listening to an audiobook, I’d consider that reading. This is what a blind person would be doing by default. The reason that audiobooks are not reading is that people treat audiobooks like background noise. They listen to audiobooks while doing chores, exercise, or whatever else they might be doing. Their brains are split between paying attention to the thing they’re doing and what’s actually going on in the book.
Are you truly digesting the book if you’re listening to it via audio? Are you taking notes, and going back to re-read the difficult parts multiple times? I suppose this is possible with an audiobook but I doubt most audiobook enjoyers are doing this. If you are doing chores while listening to an audiobook, you are not taking notes or rewinding.
Who cares. Either way you get the same story. The same information.
This is pretty much addressed by my previous statements. If you listen to an audiobook while in the same circumstances that most people read, then you’re reading. However, most people are not listening to audiobooks in the same circumstances as people reading. Thus, their ability to engage with the information is impacted.
I have ADHD or some other issue that prevents me from reading, and I can only listen to audiobooks
Fair enough. I’m not talking about you. If audiobooks are superior to reading for you, then go ahead and listen to as many audiobooks as you want. However, I suspect that 95% of people that argue that audiobooks are reading would be better off forcing themselves to read. The exception does not prove the rule.
More on that last point. I’ve probably listened to over 3000 hours of podcasts in my time on God’s green earth. I spent most of that time playing video games while having those podcasts in the background. I said to myself, “surely I can be productive while playing my video games!”. This was pure cope. Not to say I gained nothing, but my return on investment was very low for those 3000 hours. I would have surely been better off reading for 100 or even 10 hours, compared to those 3000 hours of podcasts. For example, you can probably finish the Enchiridion by Epictetus in an hour or two of focused reading. Shit, isn’t it incredible that you can read a lifetime of advice by one of the all-time great philosophers in two hours?
(My example uses podcasts, but surely audiobooks would have resulted in the same outcome.)
Treating information as background noise means that your primary activity will disrupt any train of thought you might have about the material. If I was a philosopher, I’d say that there is a time and place both for clicking on heads in Counter-Strike and reading a book; they should not be comingled. Wisdom is having exactly one purpose in each moment.
I completely misunderstand how people consume audiobooks
My argument relies on the fact that I believe most people that listen to audiobooks are not paying attention to the information to the best of their ability. It’s entirely possible that I am mistaken and I accept that my argument falls apart if this is the case.
Audiobooks actually help you understand the information better
I claim that slow reading + notes + thought breaks, or a combination of skimming then slow reading, or some variation thereof, is the best way of engaging with material and achieving the goals of reading. However, it’s possible that, for example, listening to the information presented in an audio format actually helps people engage with the material, maybe by activating more/different parts of the brain. I certainly think this is possible but it’s not likely. For example, I’ve explained that I just don’t think people are paying full attention when listening to audiobooks.
If we accept my idea of “true reading” (“Reading”) as reading that accomplishes the goals of reading (re: the first section), we end up in some quirky places. Some “reading”, as defined in the Google definition, is not “true reading”. For example, a basic reading of any slop book (say, a hockey-player-jock-turned-werewolf-lover romance you’d find in the BookTok section of a bookstore), would not really count as reading. It’s certainly reading for pleasure, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t really help us achieve what we normally would like to get from (true) reading. I’m willing to accept this quirk. We can also turn the reading-for-pleasure into true-reading by performing some sort of academic reading of the work, e.g. a psychoanalytic or Marxist reading; see the Contrapoints video on Twilight as such an example (with the caveat that I think Twilight is probably closer to literature than slop to begin with).