Listening ≠ Reading

This is discouraging:

Jim Harris, a lifelong bookworm, cracked the covers of only four books last year. But he listened to 54, all unabridged. . . .

"I haven't read this much since I was in college," said Mr. Harris, 53, a computer programmer in Memphis. And yes, he does consider it "reading." "I dislike it when I meet people who feel listening is inferior," he said.

Fortunately for Mr. Harris, the ranks of the reading purists are dwindling. Fewer Americans are reading books than a decade ago, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, but almost a third more are listening to them on tapes, CD's and iPods.

Sorry Jim, but when you listen to a book on your iPod, you are no more reading that book than you are reading a baseball game when you listened to Vin Scully do play-by-play for the Dodgers.

It gets worse:

But audio books, once seen as a kind of oral CliffsNotes for reading lightweights, have seduced members of a literate but busy crowd by allowing them to read while doing something else.

Well, if you're doing something else then you're not really reading, now are you? Listen Jim, and all other audiobookphiles out there: If I can barely wrap my little mind around Vollmann while I'm holding the book right before my face and re-reading each sentence 5 times each, how in the hell am I going to understand it if some nitwit is reading it to me while I'm brewing a cappuchino on my at-home Krups unit?

It's not reading. It's pretending that you give a damn about books when you really care so little about them that you'll try to process them at the same time you're scraping Pookie's dog craps up off the sidewalk.

When are people going to get the message? Books are not TV. Books are not movies. Books are not the internet. They're not radio. They're not plays, they're not songs, they're not paintings, performance art, gymnastics. They're just freaking books. You hold them in your lap and stick your nose down in them and stay still for hours at a time except for when you turn the pages with your fingers. That's a book. That's reading a book. Nothing else.

Listen, I'm perfectly willing to believe that you audio people out there can obtain some kind of pleasure from your audiobook experience. Great. More power to you. But don't go pretending like you're some kind of big-time reader because you consumed the complete works of Balzac via mp3. No, you're some guy who listened to an iPod while cooking dinner.

It goes on:

Gloria Reiss, 51, of St. Louis, said her officemates correct her when she mentions having read a book.

"They'll say, 'You didn't read it, you just listened to it,' " said Ms. Reiss, who switched to audio when her two jobs and three poodles made it hard to find time to curl up on the couch. Recently a colleague refused her urging to take a Stephanie Plum mystery along on a long drive.

"She goes, 'I like to read my books,' " Ms. Reiss said, "like that makes her better than me."

Oh righteous indignation! You go girl!

This is so like us, isn't it? We spend more and more time at work and doing all kinds of other crap, but we just keep trying to cram more and more in. Maybe, you know, combining things is the new American paradigm? Maybe we can listen to audiobooks while watching the newest Desperate Housewives (subtitled, of course), while stitching, and walking on a treadmill. Heck, if we can cram those 4 leisure activities together, think how much time that will leave to spend at the office, not to mention how much time we'll have for agonizing over how we're going to make that next home payment.

Comments

[Dan Wickett]

Scott,

While I tend to agree with you that listening to the books and reading are not exactly the same thing, I'm not quite as willing to go along with what seems to be your biggest problem with the idea of listening - that the listener is doing something else at the same time.

It is incredibly rare that I find myself JUST reading. Maybe (and I really stress maybe) 5% of the total pages I read.

I have three kids, with one old enough that he doesn't go to bed until 9 p.m. on school nights and more like 11 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. I don't work all that close to home and so spend at least ten hours per week in my vehicle.

Beyond books, I do enjoy other aspects of pop culture quite a bit, specifically television and music. Unless it is really late at night while I read, one or the other is going on at the same time.

Maybe I'm alone here and everybody else who considers themself a reader (which I admit, I consider myself) can say they only read while nothing else is going on, or at least more than 1 in 20 pages (and again, I believe that to be a high estimate) - but I can't.

I've listened to books while on long drives. Most of the time I've done so, it was books I've already read, because it was read by the author and I thought it would be interesting to hear where their inflections and stresses were. There has been one book in particular though, that I couldn't find at any used store, or at abebooks.com, and my library had an unabridged version. I listened to it and don't believe I missed much more than I would have if I had read it at night with the kids buzzing around, the dogs barking and tv on.

While driving, I frequently have kids in the car. If I'm talking to them, and driving, while I'm obviously paying attention to the road, lights, etc., I still hear 95% of what my kids are saying and can hold that conversation with them - I think it's the same if I'm driving alone and the conversation is the one-sided version coming from my cassette player.

Enjoy,

[Frances]

Scott, you're being way too dogmatic here. Besides, you're forgetting a whole group of the population -- those with learning disabilities, for whom reading is hard hard work, while listening to a book is pleasure. An author creates a mood, character, a complete world in a book and the point is to share that with another person. Reading the words may be the way I prefer, and you prefer, but it is not the only way. The most important thing is that world be shared.

[Scott]

Dan,

I agree with some of what you're saying, but it is true that I try to have nothing else going on while I'm reading. I understand that it's not always possible to exclude intrusions, but I like to exclude them as much as I can.

I like to keep my head in a book for as long as possible at a time. I feel like if I'm constantly being brought out of the book by passersby, radio, friends and family, etc that I'm not getting as good a sense of the book as I am if I'm able to keep myself from being brought out of the book. I like to immerse myself in the book and not have that membrane pricked.

At root, though, I think the issue for me is reading vs listening. In my opinion, reading with intrusions is still at least reading, whereas audiobooks is something else entirely. I've listened to audiobooks before and I've attended plenty of author reading and (to me, at least) the experience is completely different than when I'm reading the actual text.

[Scott]

Frances,

The article was not talking about people with disabilities which make reading difficult or impossible, and neither was I. The discussion is people who are perfectly able to read, but choose audiobooks instead.

As for sharing stories, there are many, many ways a story can be shared: a play, a movie, a book, puppets, cartoons, lyrics in a song, ballet. If someone wants to share a story by having it read to them, then I'll grant them their preference, but that is not reading.

[Dan Wickett]

Scott,

Like I said, I agree with your premise - that reading and listening are different - I just think you pounded on the doing multiple things issue as the reason, which I don't really agree with.

Enjoy,

[Dave Munger]

There are so many different types of reading that it's really difficult to say what is and what is not reading. For example, when I used to read aloud to my daughter, it was a very different experience from reading silently to myself: I was focused on performance, not comprehension. But it's quite a stretch now to say I haven't "read" The Hobbit. I read the whole thing, out loud!

Proofreading is an entirely different form of reading, and if it's done well, you really don't come off with much of an understanding of the text. The best proofreaders divorce themselves from the content of what they read and focus only on the individual words.

Sometimes I'll skim or read something very quickly, and arguably I've "read" it, but have I understood it? If I listen attentively to an audiobook I might have better comprehension than if I've proofread or read it aloud.

As a developmental editor (not a proofreader or copy editor), I might read a book more closely than a typical reader, but then I haven't had the same experience as someone who reads solely for pleasure. Which one of us has truly "read" the book -- the editor or the passionate reader?

As a scholar I read books in an entirely different way, and I might read a book several times, each time for a different purpose. I might, as many scholars do, place undue emphasis on a single passage that supports my pet literary theory. I might read the book in a subversive way that blatantly and intentionally contradicts the author's intention. Have I "read" the book now?

[Scott]

Okay Dave, good point. I agree that I read differently The New York Times, Lord of the Rings, The Scarlet Letter, and Word Munger.

But in each of the examples you've posited, the essential factor of your eyes viewing the words has occurred.

It may very well be that if someone if hurrying through a work, that person will have worse comprehension of it than if he/she were to listen to the audio. For that person, an audiobook may be the better altenative. But I would argue that in each case, neither person is really respecting the book at hand, and neither is reading it the way it was intended to be read.

[tito]

Obviously reading & listening are different things. From the article:

"Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear," said Harold Bloom, the literary critic. "You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you."

I think Bloom is onot something as far as recognizing the different cognitive processes at work when text is processed visually as opposed to aurally. I think he (and perhaps Scott) too easily make the assumption that what works best for him works best for others. Namely - the best way to become enrapt with a work is visually (and tactiley [?]) as opposed to listening to it.

While not everybody may not have the extreme limitations of blindness, or possibly dyslexia that make visual interpretation more difficult/impossible, I firmly believe that some people are better suited to processing audible input versus visual. And to denigrate one in favor of the other, I see at best as pointless - another chance for snobbishness to rear its head. Is it better to read Crichton or listen to James? Surely some can listen just as attentively as some can read.

Such ideas don't seem to distant from Wesley Snipes's character in white men jump - "You can hear Joyce, but you can't HEAR Joyce" - a chance to belittle and distance one from the non-authentic culture consumer.

[Jonathan]

You're right. Literally, it's not reading the book. When I go to a poetry reading I am not reading poetry, but listening to someone, usually the poet herself, read it. When I see a production of The Tempest I am not reading Shakespeare. When my fourth grade teacher read The Hobbit to us I was not reading Tolken. In all these cases I am processing the text in a different way from how I would do so if I were reading the text. In all these cases, as well, I am getting something else I wouldn't get from reading: the original author's voice, a dramatic production of Shakespeare, the experience of sitting with my classmates all enraptured by the same story.

Of course, you could argue (as you have) that the "multi-tasking" aspect of audio-books makes for a more impoverished or distracted listening experience. Also, that the books most likely to be consumed that way are books in which one doesn't have to stop and puzzle over every sentence. I don't think, however, that audiobooks are intrinsically a bad way of experiencing some books, especially genre fiction and journalistic non-fiction. I also think there could be a benefit if the reader is the author himself. I'm not a user of them myself, however.

[Scott]

Tito,

I agree with you that some people process thing better visually and other process better aurally. For those who prefer audio, we have many different kinds of art, much of it audio-based. However, I firmly believe that literature is not one of those arts.

Perhaps I'm being snobbish about reading. If so, then that's a charge I'll accept. I'm willing to believe that people can enjoy audiobooks, and if they do then more power to them. But I don't believe that what they are doing is reading, and I believe that something is lost in the translation.

[Scott]

Jonathan,

Agreed. "Comfort-book"-grade genre fiction and some kinds of non-fiction can probably be well-consumed via audio. However, in those cases I'd argue that we're reading or listening for something different than when we're reading literature. I still think something is lost in the translation, but perhaps in those cases the loss is so slight as to be negligible.

Also, to my larger point. The people in the article were using audio as a way to get out of taking time to read. I think that's disrespectful to literature.

[Dave Munger]

Interesting. Reading was developed as a way to record spoken language, which Plato and many others argued was the superior means of communication, and now we've come to the point that oral communication is viewed as "disrespecting" the language.

Of course, Plato was arguing that oral communication was superior because you could question the speaker to find out exactly what he meant -- something that's a bit more challenging in an audiobook. But, as I pointed out in my review of Outlaw Sea here at Conversational Reading, you can also get additional information about the text from the intonation of the speaker. So even recorded oral communication does have some advantages over a printed text.

I've argued over at Word Munger that books should come in both versions, so readers can switch back and forth, perhaps rereading a section that was confusing in the audio version, or listening to a section they've already read to get the additional information from intonation.

[Jonathan]

An addendum: I "see" language. In other words, I am one of those strange people who visualize language (printed words) as I hear it.

Also. I collect audio-recording of poetry. Inevitably I have also read the text. The recording is not a substitute for the text, but a supplement. Often I have the poem memorized anyway.

As a reader more oriented toward poetry than prose, I tend not to fetishize the printed word. Homer's contemporaries did not read him either. Print is a storage medium. My favorite storage medium, however, is my own faulty memory.

Henry James dictating his books... The blind Borges.

All this as a devil's advocate position. I too find it disturbing that there are people who only consume audio-books, though I would not condemn a blind person or severe dyslexic who did so.

[NYCmouse]

Cranky cranky! I don't really think it's as much about deciding between an audio book or regular book for these people, as between an audio book or Yanni. So, what can we do but shrug and try to enjoy the royalties.

[Scott]

NYCmouse--

You understand my pain!

[verbal]

Your argument seems to be that for babies, the blind, and the dyslexic, audio literature is an acceptable substitute for the Real Thing.

Now, what if you read to children? Is that bad if they aren't reading it themselves? For example, when I was, oh, ten or twelve, definitely well able to read, my family would sit around and we'd all read a book together: that is, one of us would read a chapter aloud and the rest of us would listen. I suppose that's a poor substitute for each of us reading the book ourselves individually?

Or, do you ever go to readings by authors? Is that acceptable?

How about music? Is it OK to read sheet music instead of consuming it in the manner in which it was obviously intended to be consumed? How about listening to a song without reading the lyrics in the liner notes at the same time?

I must insist that a book is not a sacred object, but rather a mechanism for communication between author and reader. Whether it is printed on fine linen or cheap pulp or transmitted digitally or read aloud, it is the content which counts, not the package.

[ed]

Interesting thread here. I see Dan Wickett's point entirely, and I think I fall somewhere in between the two extremes. While I'm not that big a fan of audio books, particularly the unpardonable dry readings offered by some authors, I AM a fan of dramatic radio. When the two fields are merged successfully (as they often are), then I'm a rapt listener. But I wouldn't dare to rely upon this presentation as my sole basis for the book. Because like Scott, I also find parking my head in a book and getting lost within its pages a completely compelling experience.

Of course, unlike Dan, I have the advantage of living in a city that I work and live in, where I can commute by bus or subway AND read. And a discussion of this subject can't avoid Dan's very compelling point: how are commuters expected to read in rush hour traffic if they must concentrate on the road. If it's the choice between an audio book and an obnoxious DJ, I'd probably take the audio book.

I should also distinguish between an audio book and the physical of reading out loud -- specifically, to a child. One of the great sensations of reading to a kid (or a kid at heart, as some of my past girlfriends have been) is that they ask you questions and you can then go back to a particular passage and reread it together. In this way, a solo act of reading transcends its qualities and becomes a collaborative experience with another person.

I think Scott and I have very similar reading styles that are perhaps a little more intense than the norm. For me, I require near complete attention to a book and I must take in its entire meaning (or as much as I can in a single sitting), even if it means rereading the last chapter.

I'd venture to say that a lot of people don't read this way. If you're like me, and you read about two or three books a week, then a 300 page novel isn't that big of a deal. But most people don't read that fast or that closely. Indeed, as the survey results I just pointed seem to suggest, they can't even remember the damn title.

I'm in full support of anything that will get people attracted to books. And while I bemoan the idea that people are relying exclusively upon audio books for their sole reading fix, it's better than no fix at all.

[Darby]

A few totally random points:

Reading is active, listening is passive. Essentially. (It is, to some degree, all a matter of pacing, whether it be imposed or not.)

If you wanted to have some real fun--create some sort of a "reading comprehension" test for people who have "experienced" a book. I suspect the readers would do generally better than the listeners.

I suspect most authors of novels write books to be read--not scripts to be heard. (But I think the best novelists may be the ones who write with some sense of the sound of the language--how the reader hears it inside their heads, or how they hear it when they read a striking passage to themselves, out loud.)

[Ed]

Darby: Actually, I would fundamentally disagree. Listening can be very, very active. In fact, I find that listening to certain people (or even certain readings) to require skill, patience, and active fortitude. Same goes for read texts.

[genevieve]

Late to the party - I've been cataloguing radio content recently, listening can be very active if you have to make notes about it, leave a footprint ( so to speak) that acknowledges, " I heard and understood this". And rewinding... aargh, it sucks.
Like Scott I'm an intense reader, I've only recently learnt to read with lots going on around me. And I find listening very distracting, doing the cataloguing has made me wonder if I listen attentively to anything at all that isn't music. The Internet has definitely taught me that I'm a visual ( naturally hyperlinked) learner...
I agree with everyone here who's shared reading with others, and remember books became valuable ( and readers too) when only a few people could read, and someone was interested enough to write for all of them.

[Dan Zeidman]

As one who listens to audio books while driving and otherwise reads, I see audio books as nothing but positive for me because they allow me to "read" more than I otherwise would.

Still, curious about the comparative "value" of reading versus listening, I found this site while searching for some discussion of empirical research on the subject. Of course, there are many variables that might be measured. Comprehension, pleasure, insight, retention just to name of few. However, books have many uses and studies wouldn't, of course, measure whether reading or listening is "better." It might be interesting to compare reading and listening by measuring the electrical activity of the brain during the two activities.

Thinking about the difference between reading and listening to books brings to mind a flawed but perhaps interesting analogy with listening to music versus watching/listening to a music video. A musical recording combines with the imagination to create a unique experience. The music video robs you of that opportunity to interact with the music. Similarly the recorded voice of a reader, as Harold Bloom notes, replaces your inner voice. However, much is still left to the imagination.

[genevieve]

Dan may be right about watching opera singers rather than simply listening...

[Kenneth Grant]

The biggest difference between reading and listening is probably what's left to the imagination. This last point, about a reader's voice versus one's own inner voice while reading is right on target. Reading and listening can be both very active processes. But hearing the characters come alive, like seeing the characters on the screen, gives each a voice and form dictated by the reader or actor. When we read, we must supply these forms ourselves with the help of the author's words.

[James]

Wow. There is no other time you can tell when a person is worried about being wrong--when an simple idea itches at their soul--than when they get defensive.

Your provincial thinking notwithstanding, and although they will never replace the bound paper, audiobooks are sometimes, if not often, superior to typewritten.

Because of the audiobook convenience, in the same time that it takes most people to read one book, I can read, reread and explore large minutia on the Internet at the rate of about 75 "books" a year. All this while completing a Ph.D. and training for a triathlon. I'm sorry, there is no way that this would be possible with traditional texts. What does this mean? A more enriched life.

You're right: I am not reading these books. And I really could care less that I'm not because I'm absorbing and retaining more information and experiences than above average traditional readers.

But I do have a traditional text always at my bedside. Like I said: they can never replace them. But they they are a necessary supplement for a more enriched life.

[Ashuri]

Scott,

While I agree that reading and listening to an Audiobook are two completely different things, I would like to share my own experiences and ideas. I am an avid booklover, at only 16, and have thousands of dollars worth of books, everything from Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings to Anne of Green Gables to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

At the moment, I am 're-reading' the first six Harry Potter books to brush up on what I may have forgotten the first, second and in the case of books three, four and five, the third time around.

What I have been doing, perhaps you disagree still, is listening to the Audiobook, while reading the book at the same time. It forces me to go slower, to look at every word that is there, and I quite enjoy it.

Now, I would most certainly not listen to an audiobook before I actually sit down and read the book word for word, page for page, but after I'm familiar with the book, and have read it, I find it interesting and entertaining to listen to someone, with their unique pronounciations, their stresses, and the way they communicate the character's voice.

Perhaps I am too young to truly understand your debate, but I must say that I both agree and disagree with you - I agree because Audiobooks do not offer the same lose-yourself-in-a-good-book experiance as actually sitting down and reading a book - it gives you no time to pause halfway through a page and wonder at how in the WORLD an author could have come up with these words in their head, how they managed to get such marvelous ideas, how such gateways to the imagination can be captured in tiny little black blots on rough grained pages. I also disagree, because Audiobooks can be enjoyable, they add voices to the characters, they give you a slight sense of being there, as you are able to hear what is going on around you as if you are listening in on a good conversation.

I dont think people have to stick hard to conventional reading or the modern audiobooks - dip between one or the other, dabble in both.

As my parting word - I definately much rather unabridged versions of Audiobooks - abridged versions lose too many precious ideas and words in the frills and whistles.

Ashuri