Opinion time: Is an audiobook reading?
Or, better, when can you say you’ve experienced what the author meant to say?
Book
e-Book
Condensed book (Reader’s Digest used to do these, but stopped in 1997. But there seems to be a revival.)
Graphic novel of the book (e.g. Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower have been done this way)
Audiobook
Condensed audiobook (still around)
Cliff’s Notes
Movie (there are HOW many versions of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol?)
Wikipedia plot summary
There’s a line to be drawn SOMEWHERE, but where do you personally draw it? There also hybrid experiences: A couple of months ago, I got an audiobook of David Copperfield, but then did about 1/3 of the book by reading it. This meant that while I was reading, I was often hearing the voice of the audiobook narrator in my head.
For some of us, it might not be a choice:
Comics I Don't Understand 
It is not reading. It’s listening to someone else read.
A parent sitting at a child’s bedside and reading Hamster Huey to him is reading; the child is not.
A child sitting on a parent’s lap and following along as they read a picture book can be said to be reading, or at least learning to read.
Someone reading a graphic novel adaptation of a book is reading — but reading an adaptation.
Is listening to an audiobook like reading a play?
There is a book group. One member reads a hardback edition. The second reads a paperback. The third person reads the Kindle edition. The last person listens to the Audible verstion.
At the book group, all four intelligently discuss the book, it’s plot, themes and imagery.
Is there really a difference how the ideas got into each person’s brain?
While technically not reading, it is not inaccurate to say you’ve read the book.
What about the person who watched the movie? What about the person that listened attentively at the book club then went to a second book club and relayed the plot, themes and imagery as if they had read the book?
I’m not sure just getting the ideas into your brain is the difference between reading and not reading.
I suspect we all agree that hardback edition, paperback, and ebook are reading as you actually read all the words the author included.
Listening to the audio book also includes all the words, but isn’t actually reading, but depending on the purpose, may be perfectly acceptable. For a book club or a bedtime story, for instance, I see no issue with using the audio book.
If, however, the purpose is to learn to read, such as in elementary school, I don’t think an audio book counts. On the other hand, in that circumstance, if an abridged version or graphic novel helps the developing reader, it’s a good thing, and counts as reading, but doesn’t count as having read the original novel.
People can get hung up on the semantics of “reading” as a specific delivery mode rather than focusing on consumption of the story. Not only is it ableist, it’s needlessly elitist.
Now, leaving out the delivery mode, there is the issue of adaptations. While an unabridged audiobook is the same content as the paper copy or ebook, any sort of abridged version is going to be making choices about what is important and what is not. A comic or movie will necessarily be a different experience because at a minimum a lot of verbal description is being shifted to just showing things (which requires interpretation). Keeping the original author involved in the adaptation can help, although keep in mind that enforcing authorial intent on visual interpretations can be jarring when the original text was interpreted differently by readers. Is the movie the same story as the book? How close is close enough? These are valid debates to have.
Whether words on paper are somehow superior to words on a screen or words spoken aloud? That’s just looking for an excuse to sneer down at someone.
I should also add that watching a movie definitely does not count, as there could be significant differences between the two.
@chemgal – Ever read “The Natural”? Very, very different ending than the movie.
Dvandom – I’m not sure how it is ableist to say reading has a specific delivery mechanism rather than just absorption of material. You can’t claim to have run a marathon if you rode your bike or drove your car. Blind people can read, if nothing else in braille.
chemgal – Not all movies diverge significantly from the original story. If you’ve watched those movies did you read the story when you got the concepts and images into your brain?
In my antedeluvian high school years, Cliffs Notes were published in Canada under the name Coles Notes, after a then popular bookstore chain. I never bought them but watched not a few classmates lose marks for incorrect facts and mangled or altered character names. I don’t know whether the names were changed for copyright or copywrong reasons, but it seemed to be a common problem for those who relied on the editions in the yellow and black covers.
This issue with an audiobook is that listening can be passive as opposed to active. Listening while driving, for example, means at least some attention is diverted to operating your car, and it can become something like background music. Also, it’s a performer interpreting the author’s words, adding or subtracting emphasis. Even a neutral monotone imposes something not inherent in the text. That said, a good reading can at least provide an ambiance that supports the text rather than upstage it.
Also, any translation from one medium to another involves tradeoffs. A book based on a movie, for example, is often forced to spin out words to replace what was powerfully and abruptly conveyed in a visual image.
ootenaboot: Thank you! I grew up in Ontario, never used either Cxxxxx Notes, but had in my mind “Coles” but knew they were “Cliff’s”, wondered where that had come from. Now I know!
What about reading a book in translation? (To say nothing of listening to a book in translation…)
I’ve read some Asimov in German translation, and after a point, I was unaware that I was reading German, and couldn’t recall which I’d read in which language, even when browsing through the book in English later.
The experience was similar to when I watched an English language movie dubbed into German around the same time (“The Accidental Tourist”), and I totally forgot I was actually listening to German, to the point that in the movie when they go to Paris, and the start speaking actual English to convey that they are trying to communicate to French speakers and they don’t speak French, I was completely thrown — they had been speaking English heretofore, because they were Americans talking in their native language and I just forgot that actually I was hearing dubbed German, but when they suddenly started speaking actual English, my mind was blown.
First I want to say that Dvandom’s personal attacks on other commenters are inappropriate and uncalled-for. If we were discussing the relative benefits of walking versus running for exercise, it would be no more ableist or elitist than discussing reading versus listening.
That said, the two experiences are not equivalent. They’re often fair substitutions but they aren’t the same, not least of all because reading is active and listening is passive. This affects comprehension and retention, albeit not in the same way in all people.
More concretely, unless the author is a skilled voice actor and/or director, someone else is interpreting the characters and tone in between a fictional audiobook and the audience. Is Shadow belligerent or soft-spoken? Either can be supported in the text of American Gods but the audiobook decides for you.
Some works can’t be fully communicated by audiobook. Just imagine an audio version of House of Leaves or Lost in the Funhouse. The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody has deeply nested footnotes. Ibid: A Life is more endnotes than text. Lots of books refer to their own illustrations.
Audiobooks are fine – some people wouldn’t have the opportunity to take in books at all without them. A lot of what I said doesn’t apply at all to non-fiction. But they’re a substitute for reading, not the same thing.
When you read a book you don’t know if you are pronouncing all the names correctly. But when you listen to the audiobook, you don’t find out how to spell the names.
The pronunciation problem was more of an issue when I was a little kid, reading “Sir Lancelot” as “Sir Lankalot” and “idiot” as “eye-dot”.
I have never found out whether Wackford Squeers’ prep school Dotheboys Hall in “Nicholas Nickleby” was pronounced to rhyme with”both boys” or “sue the boys”. The intention is to to suggest that he “does” (i.e. cheats) the boys, but it’s not clear how obvious Squeers wants to make it.
Lark brings up the issue of translation, which particularly rears its ugly head in translations of the Bible — and is easily illustrated now, because internet sites like Bible Gateway make it easy to compare different translations.
One example is ‘almah’ in Isaiah 7:14. KJV translates this as “a virgin”; NRSV as “the young woman”.
Obviously, few of us are going to be reading biblical texts in the original Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek but the conscious or unconscious biases of the translators can creep in, so we are getting a slightly altered version of the original.
I agree with @chemgal (5 & 7). I can imagine, though, that if you’re trying to learn a language, reading it while listening to it might be beneficial. MiB (15) raises good points about pronunciation and spelling.
I have become a fan of audiobooks, because I can use routine driving time to absorb the book. When I miss a part due to traffic concerns, I can jump back in 15-second intervals. (That’s why I never liked books on tape.) If traffic gets gnarly, I can just stop it for a while.
If it’s a book-club book, and I don’t have time to sit down with the real book, the audiobook (if available) lets me partake in the discussion anyway.
Andrew Millar (14) has an interesting point about “interpreting the characters and tone,” but I’m not sure I can buy the active/passive argument. And yes, a lesser narrator can be an unpleasant distraction, but on the other hand, a good narrator can seriously enhance the experience. I have listened to six of Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody books narrated by Susan Erickson, and her interpretations have, IMHO, made the books much better than my simply reading them would have been. I’m now in the midst of another one, narrated by someone else, and the difference is quite notable.
I haven’t listened to more that a few bits of an audio book. Even when I was still a productive member of society, my drive was only about 15 minutes each way. I preferred to listen to music, originally on the radio then later using an iPod. I rarely went on longer trips by myself.
These days I don’t drive much at all. I haven’t fired up the Venerable Bronco since last Sunday, but will be going to the store today. I could listen to one while doing my daily walk, but that’s only about 30 minutes. What I do is queue up talky videos that equal abut the right amount of time. The Hockey Guy and Adam Savage are good for this.
The old rec.art.sf.written discussed this recently. A guy who does have significant solo drives mentioned that six hours of listening only got halfway through a book. Someone recommended increasing the playback speed.
Book, ebook, audiobook, doesn’t matter as long as I see/hear all of it. Condensed versions don’t count. That’s the law according to Chak. YMMV
For me, words on a page work (paper or screen doesn’t matter). Oral or audio/visual ones…don’t work. I haven’t watched a movie in years because I find my mind wandering off from the story and have to yank it back, or I get twitchy and have to get up and walk – neither conducive to following the story. Audiobooks ditto except it’s been decades. I spent more time either scrolling back to find where I lost track of the story, or paying attention to the sounds and not the words, than actually following the story (both for books new to me, and for old favorites I’d read (on page) many many times before (and since)). And yeah, adapted/condensed/abridged versions may be great but they’re not the same thing.
However, I know some people who feel about words on a page the way I feel about audiobooks – they can’t keep their concentration on them. If you can follow an audiobook, that’s not abridged or adapted, then you have read the book in the sense (as said above) of having absorbed what the author was trying to say. Yes, the narrator can make a difference – but so can the font (there were some cute books that used different fonts for different characters’ speech – very distracting, for me).
I suppose, if there was a movie that was true to the book (I haven’t found one yet – as said above, a visual medium makes a serious difference) it would count as reading. I remember following along in the book for one of the (many) Little Women versions – the dialog was almost word for word, though descriptions were skipped since we were being shown what was being described. That’s probably the closest I’ve found to a movie true to the book. And someone who watched that could discuss the book with someone who’d read it with equal comprehension, so I guess that would count, more or less.
I do sometimes use Whisper-sync(TM?), a Kindle-app feature which plays an audiobook while you look at the e-book print version, and a highlighting spot moves over the text in sync with the audio. It can sometimes defeat that mind-drift JJ McGaffey writes about. (I almost said “speaks of”.)
BoiseEd sez: “And yes, a lesser narrator can be an unpleasant distraction, but on the other hand, a good narrator can seriously enhance the experience.”
I can testify to this is a somewhat counterintuitive example with Alexander McCall Smith Professor Dr von Igelfeld series. We’d gotten the standard book on tape version from the library, read by a professional working stiff voice reader, who did a perfectly competent job, absolutely nothing to complain about. But I discovered that there existed a version as read by Hugh Laurie, and I was excited to hear him read it, I thought he would enhance the experience so much, I was willing to listen to the books all over again just to hear Hugh read it.
Hugh did an awful job.
I mean, it was actively annoying listening to him — the characters are German speakers, and part of the charm of the whole series is how McCall Smith so accurately describes a certain type of fussy Germanic academic, apparently from whole cloth, but gets so much right (it’s like how Mike Meyers was able to extrapolate all of modern German culture from the one guy he knew in Canada that he based his Dieter character on…); just the name Professor Dr. von Igelfeld is so right. So there are lots of German and Germanic words in the text, and so if you’re going to read the whole series for money, you should do at least a little basic preparation, like learning how to pronounce German orthography. There is a publication frequently mentioned in the series which includes, or might consist solely of, the word for “newspaper”, die Zeitung. In German, the “z” is pronounced as “ts” (“t” sound followed by soft “s” sound) — Hugh through-out kept calling it the Zzzz-eitung, which just grates on my ears, clearly indicating he didn’t even bother to do the most simple prep — this is just the one example I remember clearly all these years later, but his whole performance suffered from his lazy approach.
The working stiff voice actor, on the other hand, did do his preparation, and pronounced all the Germanic words such that I failed to notice any problem, which only in retrospect did I appreciate how good a job he did, because I didn’t notice it. In fact, I can still remember his name (Paul Hecht) all these years later, because he did such a superior job to Hugh Laurie that I committed his name to memory.
Brian in STL mentioned increasing the playback speed. A few months ago, I had a book-club book that I wasn’t enjoying, so I did that. It wasn’t sped up enough to give a helium-voice effect, but did cut a couple of hours off the time.
Mitch4 (21): That Whisper-sync thing sounds useful (but not while driving).
BTW, my picture here is from when I was reading books for the blind and disabled for the Idaho State Library (when I lived in Boise). I miss doing that.
As I mentioned, I don’t use audio books, so I’m not too familiar with them. However with YouTube, when you increase or decrease playback speed, the pitch is adjusted to normal levels.
There’s one channel I occasionally view, a young woman who discusses vintage computers, peripherals, software, etc. She naturally speaks very quickly. I have found that if I adjust the playback to around 90%, it’s a much better experience for me.
YouTube being what it is, a fairly attractive young woman doing videos in a male-centric subject area really brings out the creeps.
When I was in junior high, the schools had record players where the turntable speed was continuously variable. I think the brand was Califone.
I recall the Phys.Ed. department brought them out for the curious co-educational class sessions where we did Square Dancing. The record had the music plus a caller giving the steps, in the jargon of the form. (Allemand left with the Ole left hand, swing yore partner, ain’t she grand?) So we beginners could keep up, they would start us off with the turntable set well below the normal speed. This was long before electronic pitch correction, so we learned to step to the profound basso caller.
When I read something – it stays in my mind. When I listen to something instead it does not register in the same way.
Husband and I do our traveling by car as opposed to trains, planes… (and he has to drive – he suffers from motion sickness if someone else is driving). When on a trip he will have a book on tape he has borrowed (by download) from the local library system. If he later asks me about something in the book – chances are pretty good I will not remember it – I need to actually read the book for it to register in my head.