If you listened to an audiobook, do you say you "read" it?

Interesting read
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Insomniacs do it in the middle of the night. Dog owners do it while trudging round the park. Some people do it in the gym, but lately I’ve taken to doing it alone in the car, on long journeys north through the dark when I need distraction from everything circling round my head.

Listening, that is; and perhaps more specifically, listening to things you might once have read instead. The growth of audiobooks, podcasts and even voice notes – those quick self-recorded clips that are steadily taking over from typed messages on WhatsApp and range, depending on the sender, from something like a brisk voicemail to a rambling internal monologue – reflects a steady generational shift away from eyes to ears as the way we take in the world, and perhaps also in how we understand it.

Reading instinctively feels like the higher art, perhaps because bedtime stories used to be strictly for children and oral storytelling is associated with more primitive cultures in the days before the printing press. But is that fair?

If the effort involved in sitting down and decoding written words with your actual eyes were to gradually fade away in years to come – just as the old-fashioned tether of a landline phone gave way to the freedom of a mobile in your pocket, and cash yielded to the clinical efficiency of credit cards – what exactly would we have lost?…….

Yet the idea prevails that listening is flighty or unserious, strictly for skivers who can’t be bothered putting in the hard yards. A sniffy 55% of respondents to one YouGov survey back in 2016 deemed audiobooks a “lesser” way of consuming literature, and only 10% thought listening to a book was wholly equal to reading it.

The view that listening is cheating prevails even though nobody thinks it’s lazy for a student to sit through lectures, and going to the theatre isn’t considered intellectually inferior to reading the play at home.

One study by Beth Rogowsky, associate professor of education at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, asking students either to read a nonfiction book or listen to the audio version, found no significant differences in how much of it they absorbed.

(Although when it comes to something complex or unfamiliar, the US psychologist and expert in reading comprehension Daniel Willingham suggests reading in print may be useful for going back to reread the difficult bits you didn’t quite get the first time, or stopping to think it all through.)……..

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...sts-generational-shift?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other