Do audiobooks count as reading? What the research says

Whether audiobooks count as reading is usually argued as a question of credit. Someone says they read forty books this year, someone else asks how many of them were listened to, and the conversation turns into a dispute about cheating. The better question is what actually happens in your head when you listen rather than look. On that, there is now some good evidence, and it is more interesting than either side of the argument tends to allow.

For understanding a story, the brain barely tells the difference

In 2019, a team at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Fatma Deniz, published a study in the Journal of Neuroscience that recorded people’s brain activity while they spent several hours listening to stories, and then reading the same stories. The researchers mapped where across the cortex the meaning of the words was being represented. The maps produced by listening and by reading were almost identical.

Once the words have been taken in, in other words, their meaning seems to land in the same places whether it arrived through the ears or the eyes. The decoding is different; the understanding is not.

Behavioural studies point the same way. In 2016, Beth Rogowsky, Barbara Calhoun and Paula Tallal randomly assigned 91 adults to take in the same chapter of a non-fiction book as an audiobook, as an e-text, or as both at once. They gave everyone the same written comprehension test straight afterwards and again two weeks later. They found no significant difference between the groups at either point.

For grasping what a book says and remembering it a fortnight later, listening held up.

Where listening does lose ground: attention

The picture changes when you look at the mind wandering. In a 2013 study, psychologists at the University of Waterloo had the same people read one passage aloud, read another silently and listen to a third, and asked them at intervals whether their thoughts had drifted. Listening produced the most mind-wandering, the weakest memory for the material and the least interest in it. Reading aloud produced the least.

The likeliest explanation is not ears against eyes but control. A page waits for you. When your attention slips while reading, your eyes slow down or stop, and you notice. An audiobook carries on at its own pace while you are thinking about an email, and by the time you come back, the narrator is two paragraphs further on. Going back is possible, but rewinding thirty seconds is clumsier than glancing up a page, so most people do not bother.

There is also the matter of what we are doing while we listen. Much listening happens on the bus, at the sink or on a walk, which is exactly what makes it valuable and exactly why attention is divided. That is a fact about how most of us use audiobooks rather than a fault in listening itself.

Which books suit which

This is where I think the argument becomes practical rather than moral. Some books are better heard. A novel with a strong narrative voice, a memoir read by the person who lived it, a play, most poetry: all of these were written for the ear, or benefit from it, and a good narrator adds something the page cannot.

Other books are better held. Dense argument, anything with tables or maps, history that asks you to keep twelve names straight, and any book you want to argue with in the margin all reward the ability to stop, go back and look again. They are often the books that give us words for things we had only felt, and they are worth meeting on the page.

Most readers already sort their books this way without deciding to. The trouble comes only when someone insists that one route is the real one.

For some readers the question is not academic

The Royal National Institute of Blind People sent its first Talking Books out on 7 November 1935, recorded on records to be played on gramophones, for soldiers who had lost their sight in the First World War and had not learned braille. The service still reaches tens of thousands of blind and partially sighted readers.

For them, and for many people with dyslexia or with conditions that make holding a book or focusing on print difficult, listening is how reading happens. An argument that audiobooks are not really reading has to explain why a blind reader who has listened to a thousand novels has not read any of them. Nobody seriously believes that, which suggests the argument was about status all along.

So does it count?

If reading means taking in the words of a book and making meaning from them, the evidence says yes: listening does that about as well, provided you are paying attention. If reading means the specific skill of decoding print, then no, and that distinction matters for a child still learning to read, for whom listening to a story is a pleasure and a help but does not practise the decoding itself.

For an adult with a book and not enough evenings, the question is simpler. For a lot of people, listening is how reading survives when life gets loud: a chapter on the way to work instead of no chapter at all. If a book loses you, stop; some books are not meant to be finished in any format. If it holds you, it has been read.

Sources

• Deniz F, Nunez-Elizalde AO, Huth AG, Gallant JL. The representation of semantic information across human cerebral cortex during listening versus reading is invariant to stimulus modality. Journal of Neuroscience, 2019.
• Rogowsky BA, Calhoun BM, Tallal P. Does modality matter? The effects of reading, listening, and dual modality on comprehension. SAGE Open, 2016.
• Varao Sousa TL, Carriere JSA, Smilek D. The way we encounter reading material influences how frequently we mind wander. Frontiers in Psychology, 2013.
• Royal National Institute of Blind People. Celebrating the history of Talking Books.