Is it cheating to access literature via audiobook? What does that say about reading and our view of it? As Audible launches its first bookless “Story House” bookstore in New York, Hilary Burton breaks out her AirPods to listen to the arguments.
What is reading? It should be such a simple question for someone like me who proofreads thousands of words every day for a living. But words are slippery things. After all, we can read music. Read braille. Read comics. Can we read… sound?
Conversations on the TikTok sub-community put that specific question into focus. On BookTok much scorn is poured on those who have “read” many of that year’s hundreds of books via audiobook. “It doesn’t count,” they say. “It’s too easy.” In this echo chamber, if someone has read more books than you, it’s your job to bring them down.
It’s not an argument confined to social media. James Marriott, Times columnist and self-confessed keen reader, argues that reading is a uniquely important and valuable pursuit, shaping our brains, our emotions and our democracy. But, ironically, his thesis is being broadcast via his Radio 4 series How Reading Made Us. You can’t actually read it.
And the science isn’t settled. Harvard neuroscientist Nadine Gaab believes “there isn’t much of a difference between the brain network for reading and the brain network for language comprehension”. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s close enough.
So, if there’s no consensus, let me put forward my own view. To me, it’s obvious. I believe that what is powerful about reading is the transmission of knowledge, ideas and thought, rather than the physical act of decoding strange symbols on a page. Reading an audiobook is reading.
Reading can be an intellectual pursuit, for sure. If you are tackling Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov or Eliot’s Middlemarch you are taking on a weighty challenge which will demand concentration. But I don’t think reading an Agatha Christie whodunnit on audiobook is a lesser experience. That’s just snobbery.
If, instead of sitting down with a printed, perfect-bound copy of Demon Copperhead (a daunting 500+ pages), you listen to the audiobook as you wash up, you still revel in the language, the story, the characters of one of the greatest works of 21st-century fiction. You are moved, you learn.
In fact, Demon Copperhead’s audiobook narration is amazing; it adds an extra depth to the book, with Charlie Thurston’s voice perfectly capturing Demon’s Appalachian accent and emotional power. After reading the printed book, I turned to the audio version to reread some favourite sections. Wonderful stuff.
Please don’t think I am against books; I love books. The feel of them, the smell of them, library books, books arranged in order, books with beautiful illustrations or endpapers or sprayed edges, books loaned by a friend or passed on from my mum or dad.
But audiobooks are a valuable and genuinely helpful tool to many people: breastfeeding mothers, partially sighted or blind people, commuters on a long car journey or on the Tube.
Yes, you won’t see how the words are spelled, but you will hear them pronounced, which can be a huge aid to people who have EAL. You can also pick up information about tone of voice and NVC from an audiobook in a way that can be challenging with the printed word. This is an enormous support to neurodivergent people who otherwise may struggle to understand those cues.
Shakespeare wrote down his words, but only so his players knew what to say; the plays were intended to move people in performance, not to be read and studied. (Though let us all be grateful that they were published, or the English language that you speak would be so much poorer.) Homer’s mesmerising tales of Troy and Odysseus are part of the oral tradition, told and retold as entertainment in a time when few could read.
What I want is for people to consume the written word, to relate to the narrative, to be inspired; to laugh, to cry, to understand. To me, it doesn’t matter if they do that by reading a hardback book, logging on to a website, using a Kindle or listening to audio. Let’s celebrate words and their marvellous possibilities.
July 2024 research by the Reading Agency showed that only 50% of UK adults read for pleasure. How many more might listen to audiobooks, if we acknowledged it as reading? Karen Napier of the Reading Agency said: “We would encourage anyone who hasn’t picked up a book or audiobook [my italics] in a while… to kick-start their reading habit.” Yaaaassss. Get your AirPods in everyone.
