Listening to Audiobooks = Fake Reading
The rise in popularity of the audiobook is an interesting 21st century development. However, the audiobook ought to be appreciated for what it is. The audiobook is a medium via which people can obtain information from books without reading. Audiobooks are consumed; they cannot be read. The simple fact of the matter is that listening to someone reading a book can never be considered the same as reading. The insulting pretense that listening to someone read and actually reading are the same demonstrates that the world has been turned upside down.
If one dares to publicly state the glaring fact that listening to an audiobook is not reading, the person will be greeted with a swarm of people instantly pretending that the argument being made is that audiobooks have absolutely no utility, and a long list will follow that includes various kinds of physical and developmental conditions that make reading books impossible. No sentient person would argue that audiobooks have no utility, but it is simply absurd to pretend that because there are some people who cannot read traditional books because of disabilities like blindness we must pretend that listening to material is not substantially different to reading material.
There are multiple ways to garner information. Documentaries are excellent when they are done well and supported by painstaking research, but watching a documentary is not the same as reading. Watching a TED talk delivered by a top-quality speaker is also an excellent way to gain knowledge, but watching a TED talk—even by a leading scholar—can never be considered the same as reading. The same is true for podcasts and other educational mediums. Successfully finishing a book that one has started reading is a great achievement in a way that finishing a documentary, TED talk, or even a long podcast will never compare. This is because reading a book often requires serious concentration for every single page in order to fully understand the material. There is no other medium of conveying information that requires more concentration than reading a book.
For people who can read and choose not to read books, audiobooks are a way to be intellectually lazy. Rather than putting in the time to sit down and do the intellectual work required to put words together while concentrating, they prefer to have someone else read to them, as if they are children being tucked in and read bedtime stories by their parents. Meanwhile, such people are the quickest to post lists bragging about how many books they have read in a single year. They want the intellectual street credibility of having “read books” without any of the requisite work. “These Are the Books I Had People Read to Me” does not sound impressive for good reason.
Aside from the lamentable fact that audiobooks have fed into the plague of pseudo-intellectualism, it also fuels the epidemic of semiliteracy. When people who can read choose not to read, and instead laughably deceive themselves that listening to audiobooks means that they are active readers, they are cheating themselves of many linguistic benefits. One of the most underrated benefits of reading is discovering new words that one can look up and add one’s lexicon. Hearing a word read to you and reading a new word used in its proper context are two completely different experiences. When a word is read in a book, the spelling and the linguistic context in which the word is used is readily apparent. There is no way for this experience to be replicated when listening to an audiobook. Words that listeners do not know cannot be easily looked up when consuming an audiobook; words can be easily looked up when reading an actual book.*
People who think listening to an audiobook is the same as reading are very likely the same people who endlessly complain that common words that serious readers should have encountered multiple times are “five-dollar words.” When one does not regularly engage with text via the conventional method of sitting down, concentrating, and actually reading, it is impossible to develop a deep, rich relationship with the English language. Rather than addressing their wanting comprehension and literacy skills, false accusations of others using “five-dollar words” are used to obfuscate their reality of semiliteracy.
The rise of audiobooks has also led to the regrettable failure to encourage young people to engage with real books. Instead, many are helping young people buy into the myth that physical books do not fit into their “learning style,” while audiobooks do. In a microwave era where everything is available quickly and instantly, young people will find it hard to develop the discipline and patience to sit with a text and concentrate on the words in it in order to decipher meaning.
The audiobook is not the only way in which people tend to avoid the intellectual work required to read a full text in order to comprehend its meaning. There are apps, such as Blinkist, which exist for sole purpose of summarizing the main points of books in order for people to pretend to have read books that they did not actually invest time into reading. Such apps will continue to grow in popularity as long as people keep pretending that any means of getting information is the equivalent of reading a book.
To be clear, listening to an audiobook is far better than not engaging with any books at all. Audiobooks are convenient, and they are useful to people who cannot read. They are good for people who do not want to invest the time into sitting and reading. It is purposefully obtuse to make the accusation that anything less than glowing praise for the rising popularity of audiobooks is ableist. The point here is not to suggest that blind people should be forced to engage with physical books. The point here is that far too many able-bodied people who can read are choosing not to read and are losing all of the linguistic and intellectual benefits that reading books can provide. The point is also that because of the rise of the audiobook, a nontrivial number of people have calculated that they can receive unmerited praise for being “avid readers” without ever having to pick up a text. This is why listening to an audiobook can be accurately called fake reading. Genuine reading is a practice that people who are serious about words and language take seriously. Those who are unserious about words and language are happy to be read to, which is fine. Such people should be honest with themselves and others, and they should stop calling themselves readers.