The difference between audio books and reading

There is a constant debate about reading and audiobooks. The argument is one of efficiency. The optimizer types herald the power of extracting information while doing other productive tasks. The analog purists scoff at the lack of imagination and immersion that audiobooks offer by taking the book out of our hands and putting it in our ears.

The digital era has changed the way we consume media while simultaneously changing our preference for what we think is the most optimal. People read to learn as much as they read for pleasure, but the two are fundamentally distinct. We can see this divide in the statistical difference between fiction and non-fiction books read per year and by which demographic. There seems to be an inverse relationship between men preferring non-fiction and women preferring fiction.

But this is not about demographics, it is a matter of experience. This is not simply a matter of brain real estate as certain areas light up in response to stimulus. It is a matter of the phenomenological experience of reading and listening.

The article I wrote for Hyperion Magazine Issue #2 goes in depth on the experience of the nebulous auditory experience of reading. But here we are going to look at the fundamental differences between reading and listening because it is painfully neglected in the debate on audiobooks and reading.

Put simply, reading requires your eyes and listening requires your ears. Viewed from this standpoint, it is abundantly clear that we are comparing apples to oranges in the fruits of comprehension.

Auditory comprehension evolutionarily precedes reading comprehension. Developmentally, we learn to listen before we learn to read. You must understand sounds in order to understand words because letters represent sounds.

Reading and listening are completely different modalities. The overlap is in acquiring, processing, storing, and retrieving information but the mediums are entirely distinct, much like the distinction between watching a movie and listening to a radio show.

Optimizing modalities

For most, it is easier to listen than it is to read. After all, reading is a sedentary act. It is possible to walk and read but it is far from optimal. Modernity has awarded us the tools to optimize our time and multitask but at the expense of attention and immersion.

What has led to the boom of podcasts and audiobooks is not just the technical availability but the convenience of listening while you do other things. Headphones freed your hands from having to hold a book. But again, this means you are not actually reading, you are listening. That was a part of the price of modern convenience. 

You can listen while you drive, run, dead lift, change your oil, and cook dinner. Reading requires all your senses and focus. When you read, the book, or screen, covers your visual field. It implies immersion because it requires focus which means deliberately aiming your attention.

Evolutionarily speaking, our culture was stored in the spoken word before it was carved into tomes. The desire to listen is part of our innate capacity to derive meaning from sounds. The digital world has enhanced that, despite saturating us in text. People still want to hear voices. Audiobooks offer a new dimension of experience by matching the words with the voice of the author. That adds a layer of prosody that the book itself does not offer, but again, it comes at the expense of listening instead of reading.

The unexamined benefits of listening

There are certain features to characters in stories that require an auditory component that is difficult, if not impossible, to conceptualize without an example. When I listened to the masterpiece ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ written by James Kennedy Toole and narrated by Barret Whitner, the experience was more like listening to a radio show than listening to a story. The narrator added atmosphere to the distinct, New Orleans dialect of Ignatius J. Riley as well as giving life to the voices of the other characters, from the exasperated, chronically disappointed mother to the flamboyant trickster and perpetually underemployed and overworked heel of all Ignatius’s antics. The nuances of their dialect are often lost in the monotonous voice of our inner reading voice.

This is a return to the burgeoning days of electric media when radios were a rare and engaging force in the American household. Audiobooks offer the fantastically descriptive universe of sound. What makes it beautiful and unique is providing an entirely different experience than reading. It gives you more than what a book ever could, an auditory representation of the character’s voice.

Books and Screens

There are some features of reading that are different and worth exploring briefly: digital reading and analog reading, the screen vs. books. The scroll bar is not the same as turning pages. In fact, reading on a screen has created a false sense of urgency where our eyes attempt to compensate for the lack of tangible progress and look for the scroll bar to guide us on how much more time it will take. The artificial sense of urgency has ruined many great articles. But when you are immersed in a great book, you can feel how much is left. It could be that we do so much on screens it is difficult to discriminate the task or purpose whether it be work, information gathering or pleasure, whereas a book is a thing in itself that serves a distinct purpose with a visibly finite structure.

When the mother reads a book to her child, there is no question that the child is not reading but listening. They may be sharing attention on the same visual field of pictures and letters but when it’s a chapter book, a page of text, the child retreats to their imagination where the words become movies in their mind. This also calls to the difference between reading aloud and reading silently to yourself. This is another topic worth exploring because there is an added dimension of sensory experience with auditory feedback as opposed to the nebulous sound of our inaudible reading voice in our head.

There is a stark difference between reading and listening. Each modality offers a unique experience. There is no right or wrong way to consume a book, but there are specific differences between modalities. When it comes to audiobooks, the difference between listening and reading is self-evident.