I am curious what people think about the relative value of listening to an audiobook vs reading the physical (or screen-based) book. To me, audiobooks feel like cheating somehow, but I am not sure whether my opinion holds up to scrutiny.
How do the two compare in terms of comprehension of the material, retention, brain stimulation, or any other criteria you can think of?
PS apologies if this was covered in a previous thread. The Similar To prompt actually highlighted a couple of potentially relevant much older threads, but I am unable to open them. The one I was able to find did not answer my question
PPS I am hoping for a factual answer, but if not, feel free to move to CS or IMHO
I don’t know… somehow audiobooks strike me as being for people who can’t read well. It’s probably an uncharitable assessment, but my intuitive/gut feeling is that the tradeoff in time you take in listening to an audiobook is only offset if one of a couple of other situations are taking place- you are a captive audience (i.e. long road trip, plane flight, etc…) or you struggle to read, and audiobooks take the mechanics of reading out of the picture and make the experience much more enjoyable.
Otherwise I haven’t really been interested in audiobooks vs. regular books (printed or e-reader), because I can read pretty fast.
The only audiobooks I’ve had that have been an improvement over reading the text are the Lord of the Rings novels, and in that case, only because of the various pronunciations of the other languages, and for the songs themselves. Harry Potter? Not really any better than reading it.
I used to listen to audio books a lot when I still commuted to work regularly. That’s where they really shine - you can listen while doing other things, like driving.
Of course, that’s also their downside. When driving, your attention is divided, so I always found the retention to be less than if I were reading the book myself. But of course, you can’t do that at all while driving.
For casual reading, this doesn’t really matter, but for learning something, though, it’s something you’d really have to keep in mind. Listen to the audio book for the general outline, but be prepared to go back to the text version to solidify the critical details.
Or people who read extremely well, loves stories but have to drive a lot.
To answer the OP, I think a lot of it depends on the narrator. Their interpretation leads to voices and inflections that bring the story to life. On the other hand, I have listened to audiobooks that might have been better in print (Whalefall comes to mind. TAAK!!!)
Some people opine that telling stories verbally is one of the oldest human art forms, and audiobooks harken back to that tradition. There’s value in hearing someone who is really good at storytelling, even if you yourself are a skilled reader. In fact, if you go to a major audio book source like Audible, you’ll see that they regularly advertise books as being read by particular narrators, as the best of them have developed followings completely independent of the particular books they’re reading. They’re minor level stars in their own right, just like the original authors.
Eyeball reading is an activity that demands commitment. Audiobooks are like a force multiplier, doubling the value of each minute I spend listening to them. I listen to audiobooks in the car, the shower, the kitchen, on walks, etc.
Some books are also made undeniably better by recording, particularly autobiographies narrated by the author.
A bias that ‘audiobooks are only for weak readers’ is doing two things: helping you form wildly inaccurate impressions of people and limiting your own entertainment options.
I started to listen to audio books only when my library didn’t have them in ebook format. I vastly prefer reading. It’s much easier to go back and reread a passage in text than to rewind to it in audio; sometimes the reader has an annoying voice or accent; sometimes the reader mispronounces words; in some books, the reader tries cringe-inducing accents or dialects or otherwise “does the voices” in distracting or annoying ways. In an audiobook, if you hear an unfamiliar or foreign word, you don’t know how it’s spelled in order to look it up.
However, with an audio book, I can hit “play” and trot off to do a boring chore while listening. I’m more enthusiastic about doing handcrafts if there’s something else to occupy my mind, and listening is better than watching TV.
I didn’t think I’d be able to absorb information as well from audio as from text, but I seem to retain about as much as I do from an ebook (less than I do from physical books).
I’m fairly new to audio books, and came to them mainly for detective fiction and light relief. I read a lot of fat non-fiction (serious histories etc) in hard copy, but soon began to do some in audio format.
The pros are that a heavy-duty non-fiction work will take you lots of time, so you’ll be doing it in chunks regardless, and they may as well be while you are sitting in traffic. The other pro- is that good writing will have good cadence, which can be enhanced by good audio reading (right voice actor, right speed, thoughtful phrasing) so its enjoyable and also helps you to take it in.
The big con for me is that returning to a particular line, or flicking back a few pages to find out which King George we’re now talking about is tedious and often not practical. While you’re wondering, the narrator keeps banging on and you can lose your sense of what is being said. Also when traffic starts moving again, you cannot be completely focussed on the text.
My compromise has been to do non-fiction audio books on non-essential stuff that is still good to know, but it won’t matter if I miss a bit or mishear.
Sone books are definitely better off in eyeball format. I listened to The Gone-Away World not long ago and, while it was incredibly good, I wish I’d read it the old-fashioned way. The book was very dense (in good ways) and I think I’d have enjoyed it more if I’d been able to linger and ponder at my leisure.
I don’t mind rewinding an audiobook if I have to, but even so they definitely enforce a cadence that’s dictated by the narrator’s interpretation of the author’s intent.
I’m a fairly fast reader, and for me audio books are just painfully slow. I tried listening to a few on the way to work but I found them difficult to enjoy just because of the slow pace.
All of the people I know who listen to audio books do so while driving. I have never thought of them as something for people who don’t read well.
I’ve mentioned this in a few other threads, but novels that are adopting a journal, interview, or other first-person perspective, are often quite good in an audiobook format. I’ve mentioned The Martian and World War Z in those prior threads. In some ways, the second especially (voiced by around 2 dozen genre actors!) works BETTER in that you hear the unique voices of each person telling their stories of the literal end of the world.
Mostly though, I’m in @engineer_comp_geek’s camp, it takes so long to listen to a story, and I’m almost always doing so while driving or doing something else which snatchs my attention away (and for the best)!
But yeah, everyone I know uses them for travelling, mostly driving, occasionally plane travel to block out other passengers - which brings up another, related point. My wife and one of my friends, both frequent readers, get unspeakably motion sick if they try to read as a passenger in a moving vehicle. So audiobooks there as well.
I think it can also depend a lot on the individual person.
If I try to listen to anything very long, I almost always lose track of what’s going on; part of my mind will have paused to think about a particular point, or gone off on a sidetrack, and the speaker will have gone right on and I’ll have little or no idea what they said. This isn’t a problem with reading a book, because I’ll look up from the book to muse (or to let in the cat, or to adjust the stove, or whatever) and can then return my eyes to the text right where I left off.
I’ve heard some very good storytellers in person, and that’s an entirely different experience. I have no trouble keeping track of what’s going on in that situation – but it occurs to me that I’ve never been at a telling at which any of the stories were extremely long. I think some of it is all the other cues of being in the same room, though. I can follow a short piece by a good teller on audio only, but if it goes on very long I will start losing track, as above.
Are movies made from books “cheating”? Lots of audiobooks are poorly done, but when well done they are astoundingly satisfying. Even for “pulp” content they can be very fun, like listening to old radio shows.
But best of all are some books read by the author (not every time, some authors aren’t really good at reading aloud).
In short it’s like everything else, they range from good to bad. And listeners have different tastes. Nothing inherently bad about them at all, it’s quite nice to have them added to the mix. And the easy access is so much better than the reel-to-reel audio tapes of my youth.
Lots of good points made above. If I have a choice, I much prefer reading since you can absorb content so much faster. On the other hand, I used to have a bad habit of gulping down written material rather than savoring it, if I was reading for fun. I’ve read (heh) that this is a common problem among people who were precocious readers as children (that’s me) without any guidance to direct them to suitably challenging, age-appropriate material. Left to their own devices, such precocious readers end up rushing through boringly easy books or vainly trying to read books that are too difficult, resulting in eyes passing over material without comprehension. Bad reading habits ensue.
I’ve mostly trained myself out of that since I started editing professionally a couple of decades ago, as editors obviously need excellent focus on every word of every sentence. Still, if I’m just relaxing with a mystery novel, I occasionally lapse into my old bad habits.
That’s my long-winded way of saying that audio books, in addition to being wonderful if I’m doing mundane chores like cleaning or chopping vegetables, do have the advantage of making it impossible to skim. Every word is presented to you at the same measured pace.
And that’s something that I consider a downside of audio books. Every once in a while, you come across something that, in text form, I’d just blip over, but in audio, you have to listen to the whole thing.
Examples; One book had a Chinese-inspired culture, in which one major city was named with the same word repeated four or five times. I’m sure in Chinese, this has some kind of significance, but to me, it’s just meaningless. In text, it would have just been one combined word, but in audio, you have to listen to every single repetition.
Another example, one book had a lot of the dialogue in short snippets, all in the form:
“Dinner?” Bob said.
“Yes,” Dave said.
"Pizza? Bob said.
“Sure!”, Dave said.
This went on for pages, and all those "said said said"s really started to grate.
I’m a pretty serious reader who’s done a lot of both, and the impact can be the same. There are many books I’ve absorbed fully via audio and never picked up a paper copy at all; I remember them as if I’d read them in print. Audiobooks can be 100% absorbing; there’s been times while driving that I’ve had to pull over to listen.
In a way audiobooks can be even more impactful than print because they force a human speaking pace. If I’m reading, I can skim, but that’s hard to do when listening.
I do limit myself to good books on audio. Something that’s not tightly written isn’t worth my listening time at all; that’s what skimming is for.
Back in the old days, increasing the speed of an audio recording meant increasing the pitch, so that it sounded like The Chipmunks. Nowadays, though, you can increase the speed without otherwise affecting the sound much. I listen to a lot more audiobooks, and enjoy them much more, now that I can listen at 2x speed, and I seldom notice any reduction in quality, at least not enough to affect my enjoyment.