One of my goals this year is to read 50 books. I signed up on Goodreads to track my progress, and I soon realized that I was chugging along a lot slower than I expected. I’m a fast reader, in general, but my new job and longer commute are eating into my usual reading times, so I’m not getting through as many books as I thought I would. I used to read on public transit back home in Montreal, but here I drive everywhere. A friend suggested audiobooks for my commute and I resisted for a while, considering them “cheating” since they’re not real books.
After listening to a couple of them, and adding them to my total for the year, I posted on my blog and on Facebook to ask what people think about it, and I’m getting mixed answers. What do you, wise, book-loving Dopers think about audiobooks?
I want to list the audiobooks in my total, but I’m not sure if that meets the spirit of the reading challenge. Initially, I thought I’d find a little time each day to dedicate to a book, but it’s been very hard to accomplish. Do I need to cross the audiobooks out and push myself to carve out more reading time? Or can I count my commute “reading”, since I’m getting the same education through a different sensory input?
It is a different experience, and, of course, listening to a book takes far longer than reading one, if you are a fluent reader. But I’d say that it counts. The purpose of your challenge is to engage yourself mentally with a number of good stories or well-reasoned, well-written non-fiction works, is it not? You will get those things from hearing an audio book, you’ll stimulate another part of your brain, and it will make your drives better, too.
I listen to a lot of books on my long (10-35 miles) runs, or when I am stuck on the dreadmill due to inclement weather. I find it a nice break from music. Additionally, I believe that I retain the information well because my body is moving. I suppose I would have a hard time telling someone who is visually impaired or has difficulties with visual comprehension that an audio book is not “real reading.” So yes, I believe an audio book “counts.”.
It probably depends on how well you retain them, and on your reasons for reading.
Some audiobooks I just cannot get through because the droning, ungodly Microsoft Sam voice is too much. Others, I retain as well as print books.
One upside you might find to audiobooks is that there’s no temptation to skip ahead. I used to have a terrible problem with ending-hopping and adding audiobooks into the mix taught me patience.
I don’t know if you’re just joking but I wouldn’t call text-to-speech a true audiobook, and I sure as hell wouldn’t listen to a whole book that way if I didn’t have to. I’m sure some people do, but that would drive me nuts.
If you’re paying attention and not sleeping through them, of course they count. If I look back on what I’ve read in, say, the past 10 years, I find that I forget most of the crappy books and remember all the good ones. I almost never recall whether I read them or listened to them, though.
Opposite for me. I tend to skim and skip in real books, so frequently I will go back and reread a book and discover whole paragraphs that escaped my attention the first time. Audiobooks force me to slow down and digest it at the reader’s pace, so I get way more out of it that way. Not to refute you, just to indicate that it’s an individual thing.
Also, a good reader can make a book seem more like a radio play, and I find it does amazingly for my ability to visualize the story. The flip side of that, admittedly, is that audiobooks that are more abstract tend to be harder for me to follow because I can’t visualize what’s going on. Nonfiction texts (that aren’t memoirs) and such are more difficult as audiobooks.
In either case, I really don’t understand people who insist on mixing the medium with the message. In this week I’ve heard claims that both Kindles and audiobooks don’t count as real books, and it just baffles me. Of course they’re real. I will admit the reader for an audiobook can have an effect on how the book is perceived (it can be the difference between a high school student reading out lines from Romeo & Juliet in a monotone and a Shakespearean actor), but if I listen to an audiobook and a friend reads the same book in dead tree version, we can still talk about the contents of the book perfectly fine.
I suspect that the people who complain that an audiobook isn’t the same as a real book just don’t do as well with audio as with text on an individual basis, but if audiobooks work for you, then they work.
Then I say it absolutly counts. My wife has trouble reading, so litens to books very well. The books I’ve listened to I remember as if I read them directly. I can’t see how you can’t count it. My mother read Johnny Tremain to me when I was ten, I can discuss it better than books I read at the same age. Why is it so different?
YES! Not only do they count, I find them much more of an immersive experience.
Which is ironic, considering I’m often doing other things while I’m listening.
With kids and a house and a job, I rarely have time to sit and do one thing (and, being fairly ADD, I don’t see what I should have to, so there --pbbbbt!–). But if I can “read” a book while I’m doing housework or commuting or working out… that’s a multi-tasking win/win!
Well, some of them are abridged, so I can see why you might not want to count those. I think a far greater proportion of audiobooks were abridged versions years ago, back when they were typically released on cassette, and “books on tape” may have gotten a bad reputation from that.
And you might not want to count them if you, personally, have trouble absorbing books (or a particular book) in that medium.
But yeah, I’d say of course it counts. The content isn’t any different.
It’s your challenge, so it’s really up to you to decide what “counts”. If the purpose of reading 50 books was supposed to be exposure to the content of 50 different works then I don’t think audiobook vs. print makes any difference, provided you are able to pay attention to and retain the content just as well either way. If the purpose was to make yourself spend more time reading than doing something else like watching TV, to exercise whatever parts of the brain are involved in reading, or simply to accomplish something that’s kind of difficult then no, I’d say audiobooks do not count.
No, not a text-to-speech program- some audiobooks I’ve attempted to listen to are read by a guy who seriously sounds like that’s what he’s trying to emulate. There is no way anyone’s natural speech is that monotonous, so there must be years of practice behind that tomfoolery. Gah.
I don’t know when that fell out of favour or whether my taste changing over from mostly nonfiction to mostly fiction had an impact, but the difference is huge.
I think they count. Whether the audiobook is as good as a print book for engaging your attention varies according to the audiobook and the listener. I do a lot of walking and spend a lot of time on the subway. Collections of short stories make better audiobooks for me; I find the interruptions to my attention (traffic signals, other pedestrians, and of course, getting where I’m going) make it harder for me to recall the details of a longer story or a non-fiction work. And of course, in an audiobook, it’s much tougher to casually flip back to the start, and then forward to where you left off.
I’m a mystery buff, so I’ve been going through Librivox for things like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Innocence of Father Brown. They have all kinds of things by all kinds of readers, including some who started doing free books there and moved into commercial voice work.
I’d count them - but it’s your goal, your experience, all that matters is what YOU think - and by now you should know if you feel like you’ve “read” them.
I agree. It’s your challenge. Decide on your goals. If it’s literally to do more reading, then maybe not. If it’s the intellectual pursuit, then of course it counts. It’s not as if you’re doing it to wimp out, right? You’re doing it to better economize your time.
And, honestly, I don’t see any problem with dramatizations as long as they are the same text as the book.
I think I’ll count them, because they’re all books I’ve added to my “to-read” shelf, and not just stuff I’m throwing into my CD player to pass the time on my commute. My goal of 50 books is mostly about enjoying and absorbing 50 works of fiction or non-fiction, to make me think a little. That doesn’t mean I won’t try harder to find time for actual reading, though, because I agree with many of you in thinking that reading is a very enjoyable pastime, and I don’t allow myself enough time for it lately.
Do you want recommendations? You might discover some new books you wouldn’t have heard of otherwise. OR, you could post the books you want to either read or listen to, and we could chime in with “Oh, Frank Muller does a great Gatsby! See if you can find that.”
Or start a new thread. I’d love to find some new books/readers. Maybe if you don’t, I will.
But watch out. I’ve had great books ruined by a lackluster reading (a lot of Libravox, and I couldn’t finish Peter Weller sucking all the magic out of Steppenwolf). There are also audiobooks that I LOVE and listen to repeatedly, but it’s the reading. I pick up the book in dead tree version, and it falls flat.
