At his Substack, Joel Miller has an excellent breakdown of the market for audio books, and more importantly, an answer to the question of whether they really ‘count’ as reading.
His answer is a qualified ‘yes.’ His bottom line is that audiobooks open the possibility for far more intake of books in one’s life than print or ebooks alone, but that we should not underestimate the physical and cognitive differences between reading a book with our eyes, and listening to one with our ears.
I am in the ‘yes they count’ camp as well. I have subscribed to Audible for years, and also regularly use Libby via my local library. Here are several reasons why I think audiobooks definitely count as a profitable type of reading.
Audiobooks vastly increase the amount of time in your day that you can devote to reading. I almost always listen to books on my commute, and I often listen while eating lunch (though not when I am having lunch with someone else!). This adds at least an hour every day that I can devote to reading.
For many people audiobooks can equal or surpass the amount you retain from reading print books. Even some defenders of audiobooks might concede that you retain less from listening to books, but I find there is one huge factor that increases audiobook retention: you can’t easily skim. Because I have to read massive amounts of nonfiction for work, I almost always skim parts of print and ebooks, which is fine and a legitimate way to read, depending on what you need to get out of a book. But it is a much different experience being forced (happily, with a good book) to hear every single word in a book. To be fair, I do regularly zone out and find myself thinking about other things while listening, but I cannot say that I consistently retain more from print or ebooks than audio.
Audiobooks are my go-to method for reading outside of my professional field. One thing I love the most about audiobooks is that I can read literally anything I feel like reading. Thus, my reading on Audible and Libby is genuinely eclectic. Sure, I still read a lot of history, but it is often history that has no immediate professional application, or that just sounds interesting. Just to cite recent audiobooks, I read Ben MacIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends, about the notorious British spy Kim Philby, and I am currently listening to Richard Snow’s Iron Dawn: The Monitor, the Merrimack, and the Civil War Sea Battle That Changed History. [Amazon Associates links] I am reading the latter because it sounded interesting, is in the excellent catalog of Audible books included in your subscription, and it is read by Grover Gardner, my favorite book narrator.
Finally, for anyone with a visual disability, audiobooks are an unmitigated blessing - a point we shouldn’t forget when discussing “preferred options” for consuming books.
It is a wonderful thing to have so many choices for how to read today. Let’s be grateful by reading more books!
From around the web:
-I will be speaking at the Spurgeon Library conference in April at Midwestern Seminary.
-Southern Seminary posted videos of my recent lectures there.