Is Listening to Audiobooks as Beneficial as Reading
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A contempo New York Times opinion slice by Daniel Willingham addressed the question of whether listening to a volume is the same as reading it. Willingham, a psychologist at the Academy of Virginia, speaks with authority: He is a leading researcher of reading comprehension. He begins the piece with a ofttimes asked question: "Is it adulterous if I listen to an audiobook for my book club?"
Willingham gives an even-handed answer, doling out points to both the written and the spoken give-and-take. He argues that they're both worthwhile but is careful to note that doesn't mean they are equivalent. Far from it. I've been listening to audiobooks for years now, and while it's not my professional obligation to do and so, I've also spent quite a bit of fourth dimension thinking nearly the trade-offs with listening versus reading. In line with Willingham's notes in the article, I listen to audiobooks when I wouldn't otherwise be engaging a book—say, at the gym or while walking. That's certainly an reward of listening over reading. But I was surprised to find that Willingham didn't mention what I consider to be the biggest difference between the two mediums: Engagement.
The critical divergence, for me, between reading and listening is that reading is something you do, where listening is something that happens to you. Reading is an act of date. The words on the folio aren't going to read themselves, which is something they literally do in an audiobook. If you're not actively taking in written information, and then you're not going to make progress on the book. Audiobooks, on the other mitt, brand progress with or without your participation. You can tune out, your mind wandering around the discipline at hand, and there will nevertheless exist frontwards motility in the story.
Willingham alludes to this point by saying that harder books—"hard texts" as he calls them—require more date. Sometimes yous need to go back and reread things. That means that harder material is better suited to reading rather than listening. But I'm not certain I concord with that characterization.
Rather what is improve suited to reading is technical material. We would never to think to listen to a math problem. We know that in club to understand it, we accept to sit in that location and dissect information technology. Similarly, if at that place's a step-by-pace argument—where A leads to B, and B leads to C, and all of that implies D—which you actually want to take in, then you should probably be reading that text, not listening to information technology.
Only this is dissimilar than the thought of listening to "difficult" material. For example, I've recently been listening to David Graeber's excellent Debt: The Offset 5000 Years. Written for a general audience, it's still a tough read—lots of information, lots of evidence, lots of arguments. And I can assure you: I oasis't picked upwardly on every dash he's laid downwards. Only that doesn't hateful that I'1000 better off going out to get a hard-re-create of the book and reading information technology on the page.
The reason is that, frankly, I'm merely not going to do that. Information technology's not a loftier enough priority on my reading list. It's either engage with the material via audiobook or don't run across it at all.
And while I haven't retained every piece of information that he'southward presented, I have spent a lot more time thinking about an important topic than I otherwise would. There's about no other venue in my life in which the social history of debt would come up up. Yet Graeber's account is totally fascinating. He makes compelling counterintuitive arguments almost where debt came from and what its social function is. I'm better off for having contemplated them. I've grappled with this hard topic for hours at this point, sustaining attention toward a problem in a manner that I otherwise wouldn't. This fill-in-the-cracks nature of audiobooks is a critical advantage.
Ultimately, I think it'due south fair—necessary fifty-fifty—to consider audiobooks and written texts as fundamentally different mediums. Asking which is superior is a chip similar asking, "Should I see the movie or read the volume?" or fifty-fifty "Should I read the summary article or the unabridged book?" They are different forms based on the same work. Which ane you lot should engage depends on what you are willing to give to it (time, above all) and what yous promise to go out of it.
Possibly the most crucial divergence between an audiobook and a written text is the presence of the narrator.
A written text has no narrator besides the 1 in your caput. And it does its all-time to return the author'due south tone faithfully. Merely anyone who listens to audiobooks knows that the narrator makes a huge difference, just as the casting makes an impact on a play. Listening to American Gods with a total cast versus a single narrator? Are y'all kidding, is that even a choice? Same with authors, especially actors and comedians, reading their own books. Trevor Noah'southward Built-in a Crime wouldn't be such a hitting if it weren't read past Noah himself doing all the accents and lending the narrative a this-was-my-life pathos. Information technology builds in a dynamic that just doesn't exist in the same form with written texts.
Then, no, listening to a book isn't cheating. Depending on the performance of the text, it might even exist the better option. And you shouldn't but limit yourself to "easy" works like popular memoirs or Jack Reacher novels if your interests range beyond them. At the stop of the twenty-four hour period, fourth dimension spent contemplating new ideas and experiencing new worlds is what matters. And if audiobooks open new ideas and worlds for y'all, and so that's all that counts.
Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/friendly-interest/201812/why-listening-book-is-not-the-same-reading-it
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