If it has to be expressed in one word I’d try auditioned since read doesn’t fit my idea of what’s going on when you listen to an audio version. That’s just me, though.
Ear-bud tanked War/Peace. Good. #UShouldReadIt
(Its even less than 130 characters, so you can add emotionally appropriate emoticons, like this: 
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Want to make up a word? “CDed” :o
Or “Audibled” !
With my hubby who knows I do most of my reading via audio, I use the word consommé (“consumed”).
I withdraw mine: “Audibled” is more elegant. 
Very true, but that’s irrelevant to question of whether there’s a difference between a person reading a book vs the same person listening to the audio version of it.
I suppose. I’ve never felt the need to communicate using only the bare minimum of syllables possible, though.
For me this is the crux of the matter. There are just too many phrases that must be used in place of single words to get the entire meaning across. Part of that, I believe, comes from the lack of a single word to express the infinitive form of a verb. You must almost always (can you think of a counterexample?) add “to” to the verb to get across the meaning of “to sleep” or “to dream” whereas other languages have forms of the verb to accomplish that task. English is not quite as sleek in that regard. And we must pay for that by having to be more prolix.
Does he bring you a bowl of soup? 
This is interesting because I don’t even see words scrolling past my eyes when I’m reading text on paper, with my eyes. If it’s written well, for me there’s a combination of a voice in my head reading to me, and a movie in my head illustrating the content. The words in front of me disappear, like something in my peripheral vision I’m not paying much attention to.
I was going to coin “earread,” but it looks like someone beat me to it.
If listening to an audio version of a book can be called “reading,” how much of a stretch is it to call watching a *movie *of a book “reading” as well? Either way, it’s somebody else doing the heavy lifting and you are just passively absorbing it.
I’m not saying I agree with that, but I fail to see an obvious difference in kind, only in degree.
I agree - it is different.
For certain texts, like poetry, it can be completey different. Some poetry is/was primarily created to be read aloud and the written form is trying to approximate that; some was primarily created to be read on a page, and the audio form is trying to approximate that.
And in written fiction sometimes the placing of paragraphs, sentence breaks etc is important and with audiobooks you only get one interpretation of that, which might not be the same as if you’d read it yourself. Plus sometimes the spelling of a word is important - like in much of Kafka’s works - or there’s wordplay that only works when it’s written down.
And if you listen to a fiction work with dialogue that’s inevitably going to affect how you hear those characters’ voices in your head. If you first encounter Harry Potter, for example, via the audiobooks, and you’re American, you’re more likely to hear those voices in a British accent than if you’d just read the books.
The medium is sometimes the message, after all.
That said, I think it’d be fine to say you’d read War and Peace if you’d “read” it by listening to it, because you still got the story and in WaP that is the main thing.
If pressed about whether you thought so-and-so’s name was interesting because it was spelt just like another so-and-so’s name, you can then point out that you listened to the book rather than reading it on the page. And you’re just reading/listening to this story for fun; anyone who nit-picks you for your usage of “read” in that context is a nit themselves.
It would have to be ear-read in order to not look odd, but I have seen that phrase used before.
Are you saying that the “active” part of reading is translating the symbols on a page into words, while the “passive” part is mentally absorbing those words and transforming them into meaning?
English actually does have single word infinitives. The practice of writing them prefaced with a ‘to’ has to do with the fact that Middle English grabbed infinitives out of Old English’s dative form. Strictly speaking, “to boldly go” is not a split infinitive, but “to pro-boldly-ceed” would be. The modals, by the way, don’t take ‘to’. To can, to must, to should, to may, to shall and so on.
What you’re observing is a difference between synthetic and isolating languages, that is, languages with a high ratio of morphemes to words and languages with a low ratio. English tends to be very isolating, although not entirely since we often inflect for plurality (one day vs two days or one man vs 2 men) and 3rd person singular (I sleep, you sleep, he/she/it sleeps, we sleep, they sleep). Also, your comment of most makes me suspect you’re falling into the IE trap. Since most languages that those of us in the North American/European global community have familiarity with are IE languages, we tend to assume that features shared by IE languages are endemic to language as a whole rather than being one possible variation.
But there’s nothing inherently special about having one word for a particular concept and a language that has to gloss that word with a phrase is not inferior. It simply has a different morphological system.
He’s saying reading is active while listening to a book on tape or watching a movie are passive.
Well, it’s one word but hyphenated: I talking-booked it.
Audibled was the first thing I thought of. It only works with folks who know about audible.com, though.
When read books to my kids, can they say they’ve read the book, or have they listened to me reading the book?
Your problem isn’t with “read” it is with the word “book.”
We use the word book when we are talking about a story someone wrote but our mental image tends towards the literal object with pages, a cover and printed words.
The word you want to use is ** novel** or story. Even though you could be bruised by someone throwing a novel at you, the word does a better job referring to literature.
So if someone asks if you’ve read the latest by an author you can say “Yes, I’ve listened to that novel.”
And you can substitute the word hear or heard as needed.