Every now and then I come across the topic of audiobooks, and their legitimacy in a world of reading. Now I don’t mean legitimacy in terms of content, but more in the metric driven world of goodreads ratings and challenges. In today’s world, numbers mean everything. Be it in the number of likes a post gets, to the number of followers one garners, to even the number of books one can read. Reading has gone from a relaxing pastime to one of fulfilling one’s yearly quota and obtaining praise from the internet.

Audiobooks gave people the ability to finish a book at a much faster pace than conventional reading, since they can be sped up (upto 2x atleast) to suit one’s pace, while multitasking to boot! A lot of hue and cry comes up on forums like reddit where the question is asked “Can they be considered actually reading?”.

Well, yes. Reading a book no longer adheres to the context of physically scanning pages, but encompasses a vaster category of how content is assimilated by an individual. There are a lot of people who, unfortunately, do not have the ability to read a book, and rely on audiobooks for their fix of knowledge. Would we then tell them they technically didn’t read the book but listened to it? Would it really matter? Most of us have grown up having listened to stories from our parents and grandparents. Why is it different now that we’ve grown up?

There are a lot of interesting articles online regarding the differences between reading a book as compared to listening to it, and I’ll be the first to agree with a number of them, in favour of reading (we’ll get to them later in the article), but to dismiss listening to audiobooks as a valid form of “completing” a book is bit unfair in my opinion.

Audiobooks add another layer to the experience of reading a book. Voice actors like George Guidall, Kate Reading, Michael Kramer, etc have such a diverse vocal range that they can voice multiple characters in the same novel giving each a life of their own. While reading we tend to picture the scene / scenario in our head; audiobooks help in taking this up a notch. I’ve found that I’ve had much stronger mental images of scenes while listening to audiobooks as compared to when reading the corresponding books. Some people even listen while following along with the book. I myself tend to alternate between an audiobook and reading the book depending on my state of mind and what I’m doing at the time.

I picked up audiobooks because my work had me reading a lot of research papers which left me drained and unable to look at a screen or a book when home. This left me a little sour and moody since books were my escape from the conundrums of daily life. I ventured to try audiobooks and, to be honest, found it hard to follow along at the beginning. I mostly found myself asleep with my earphones all tangled up, and not knowing what part of the book I was listening to before being knocked out. Audiobooks took a while to grow on me. I found myself re-listening to the same part of the book several times due to the aforementioned falling-asleep-situation, but soon found myself able to pay more attention to what I was listening to, and consequently less likely to fall asleep. I’m still not sure if that’s entirely a good thing now since I find myself up most nights too engrossed to fall asleep.

The audiobooks I started off with were also pretty simple like Ian Fleming’s James Bond series. If I spaced out for a few seconds and missed a bit of dialogue it wasn’t hard to ascertain what was missed and carry on (those books aren’t known for their writing). This did help in a way to get into the habit of listening to audiobooks. Thankfully I’ve progressed from Ian Fleming onto better audiobooks these days; better being very subjective here.

A lot of people listen to audiobooks while travelling, exercising etc,and this has gained them a lot of popularity. The ability to listen to a book and do the laundry, win-win. However it isn’t always as easy to multitask while listening to an audiobook. It, in fact, heavily depends on what you’re listening to. Audiobooks with simple straight forward English, either an autobiography or work of fiction (James Bond, mentioned earlier), I’ve found to be generally easy to multitask with. They tend to have regular characters, with regular speech patterns that are easy to follow. That goes out the window if it’s a work of non-fiction or fantasy. In the former there’s a lot of information that is being conveyed which is easy to miss when multitasking, while in fantasy the whole premise and content of the book is make believe so unless you pay attention, you won’t know what the hell is going on.

There is also a certain subset of audiobooks that take this picture-in-your-head theme a little further. They call it graphic audio, a movie in your head. These generally come with a cast of voice actors for the various roles in a book as well as sound effects for events happening in the book. For example, if in the book there is a scene where the protagonist bangs his bottle on the table and grunts, rather than say that, graphic audios would have the sound of a bottle banging and the protagonist grunting. Multitasking is nearly impossible in this case when you’re writing a report and there’s suddenly an explosion in your head. Doesn’t work. This does make it hard to follow at times, even without multitasking, and it is only in this case that I would agree that reading a book would be better, as it becomes so easy to miss the small details in all the extra graphic-ness of the audiobook.

There are also radio adaptations which are generally abridged versions of books, and are similar to graphic audio in some cases. They usually also feature a full cast of voice actors. Most notable being the BBC radio adaptations.

That being said, audiobooks are generally a beautiful way to experience a story. Some audiobooks have been narrated by the author themselves and listening to them just feels oh-so-right. It’s the story the way the author would like it to be told. Neil Gaiman and Stephen Fry do an absolutely amazing job. Their voices are a form of ASMR for me. It’s similar to how we all want Morgan Freeman to narrate anything for us. Stephen Fry has also narrated a hoard of other audiobooks apart from his own, the most popular, I believe, to be the Harry Potter Series, and Sherlock Holmes Novels.

We’ve so far mostly spoken about the good of audiobooks, but what’s the bad? Are there any? Of course! As most people will say, and it is true, people have better retention when it come to reading a book as compared to listening to it. It stems from the amount of attention/focus one pays to the words on the page, since audiobooks are generally, but not necessarily universally, consumed while multitasking. This is generally the biggest bane when it comes to audiobooks. People find it hard to recall a book they may have listened to as opposed to one they’ve read. It’s also always easier to find that one paragraph or line that really struck a chord with you as compared to finding the right minute to go back to find the same dialogue. Not to mention the very feel of the book in one’s hands as well as the beautiful smell of pages. I’m not going to get into the books vs kindle debate (not just yet anyway).

At the end of the day it shouldn’t matter how people are consuming books but whether they are enjoying the experience because that’s what most authors would want for their audience. Don’t let the goodreads system get to you and dictate how many books you have to read. The system is, probably, designed to help instigate people into reading by giving them goals. A worthy cause but, as can be seen, very easily gets out of hand. Don’t read for the sake of your goal. Read because you want to, because you want to know what happened to Harry Dresden, read to know why the universe is expanding, and read because we don’t have the patience to wait for the next season of that popular tv show to know what happens next (unless its Game of Thrones, in which case watch the show, you will be disappointed).

So, audiobooks – to listen or not to listen? Answer is why not? Give it a shot and see if it works for you. If it doesn’t, no harm no foul, we can always go back to reading the old fashioned way. I’ll link some sites where you can check out audobooks below in case anyone reading this ever decides to give it a shot. I apologise for the winding narrative of this post. Hopefully with time I’ll get better at this. Till then I hope this helps!

Cheers

Useful links:

1. Audible
2. Librivox
3. audiobooks.com
4. Some numbers related to audiobooks.