Good morning and welcome to Shelf Life where the title of today’s article was almost Audioslave but then I thought, nobody who didn’t live through the 1990s could possibly understand that. So anyway audiobias it is.
Today I had trouble coming up with a topic, even though I have a very long list of potential topics, because none of those things seemed appealing, because I have chronic depression. This is a disease that principally makes things uninteresting. So uninteresting that they become impossible to do, like writing an essay on, I don’t know, code switching. The solution to this is to find a topic that makes you really mad because the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Gatekeeping reading makes me really mad.
It’s neat to be able to feel anger when you take enough antidepressants to tranquilize an elephant. You know, despite all my rage.
This is a topic that I see come up from time to time—frequently, really—and every time I am like “oh I could say a few hundred words about that.” The topic routinely appears on all channels of social media, sometimes in regular (antisocial) media, and even in real life. The topic is whether listening to an audiobook qualifies as reading.
Oh my god of course it does. Great talk everyone. See you on Thursday.
No just kidding there’s more.
I’m a firm believer that listening to an audiobook is reading. I don’t believe you need to use your eyes for it to be reading. You can use other senses and be reading. A person using their fingertips to read Braille is reading. A person listening to an audiobook is reading.
But a lot of people don’t agree. I haven’t seen any cogent arguments for why audiobooks are not reading, only that they are not. The better-intentioned among the arguers will say things like “I totally believe an audiobook is a valid way to experience a story, but it’s not reading that story.” This is very similar to how the better-intentioned transphobes will say things like “transgender identities are totally valid but trans women aren’t actually women.” This is also on the list of things that make me really mad.
Which is nice because fury sustains me.
For the record, I have never heard anyone say, of Braille, that using it is “not really reading.” Likewise I have never known anyone to say, of sign language, that a user is “not really speaking.” The modality or reading or speaking is different than the one that is presently recognized as the dominant modality, but it’s still reading or speaking.
Is writing speaking? Or, can writing be speaking? I would say that it can. If I write a book and you read that book—with any of your senses—that is not the same as me speaking to you. However, I once worked in a retail job and had a regular customer come in who was Deaf and who preferred to communicate with staff using a small notepad and a piece of paper. This customer would come in with a sheet of paper already prepared with her question or request and staff who needed to communicate with her were invited to write their response or clarifying questions in the notebook. In this example, speech takes a written form but is still speech in the same sense that sign language is speech.
I suspect people look at reading an audiobook as a choice not to read another format of the book, a choice made from preference or convenience—which is often true. The idea being that “you could have ‘read’ the book but you chose to listen to it, and so you had a different experience.” It’s true that listening to an audiobook is a different experience than reading a book made out of paper. Reading a Kindle book is also a different experience than reading a book made out of paper. Reading War and Peace on a beach in Mexico is a different experience than reading War and Peace on a subway train in New York. However, these experiences are all reading.
Let me pose another question. When a child is too young to read a book for themself, what does their parent do? They read them the book. The child experiences the book auditorily but the word we use to describe this process is reading a book to a child.
There are also many people who do not choose an audiobook from preference but necessity. There is a large and varied group of people who cannot read, or cannot easily read, in the traditional “with your eyes” sense. This includes people who experience illiteracy, people with certain learning disabilities including dyslexia, and people with certain visual impairments. If we exclude audiobooks as a form of reading, then we exclude these folks from the act of reading on the basis of their disabilities or disadvantages, and why would we do that?
One of my college English professors, Dr. Fischer, lost his vision late in life and then did all his reading via audiobook till he passed away. You would not have wanted to be the one to tell Dr. Fischer he as not reading, I can promise you.
Next, I would question, who died and made any one person the magistrate of reading? Like—who out there has the authority to decide what is reading and what doesn’t count as reading? Obviously not a specific person, nobody has that authority, but what does science say?
Great question. According to Ragowski et al in their 2016 article, “Does Modality Matter? The Effects of Reading, Listening, and Dual Modality on Comprehension,” concluded that
“Our study found no significant differences based on whether a portion of a non-fiction book was presented via audiobook, e-text, or dual modality. We conclude that, for the average, college-educated, native language English reader, comparable comprehension and retention of text occur regardless of the modality of presentation.”
There is no evidence that comprehension and retention are affected by the modality of reading. Storytelling stimulates the brain the same way whether you use your eyes or your ears to take in the story. In fact, if either of these methods of storytelling/storylistening were inauthentic, it would be the written word you read with your eyes. The original method of experiencing a story was to hear it spoken aloud.
What is it, then, that makes some people so insistent that listening to an audiobook is not reading? Is it a sense of superiority or a desire to create exclusivity where there is not naturally any division? I honestly don’t see the appeal of gatekeeping, or appointing oneself in charge of keeping others from accessing a space, a hobby, an activity, or a resource. Reading is not finite, at least not in the sense that someone else reading drains resources out of the available pool of “reading.” Actually if you use the library then audiobooks are the exact opposite—audiobooks count toward the total available copies of a given book and anyone who is borrowing the audiobook is not borrowing the physical or e-book, leaving more copies on the shelf, or the virtual shelf, for others.
Gatekeeping is a popular pastime of small-minded people. “Oh you’re not a real gamer, you just play mobile games.” Actually all people who play video games are gamers and nobody appointed Sir Shoots-a-Lot in charge of what is gaming and what isn’t. “Oh you’re not a real woman, you weren’t born with this exact, specific set of chromosomes.” Sorry JK Rowling you may be in charge of who is a muggle and who isn’t but you’re not the chromosome crossing guard.
There’s a lot of “old guard” science fiction fans who will say “Oh you’re not a real SF/F fan if you don’t like [insert golden-age-of-sci-fi white male writer here].” I don’t see how those people don’t realize I could just as easily turn around and say, “Oh you’ve never read Octavia Butler? Then I guess you’re not a real SF/F fan.” Or any other name. But I would not do that because as far as I’m concerned everyone who likes science fiction and is not trying to gatekeep it from others is cool and can come hang out over by me.
Likewise, with reading. There’s literally no reason to gatekeep this. It’s an activity in which the vast majority of the world’s population partakes and there’s no reason to exclude the slice of that population who prefers or requires ebooks.
The human brain doesn’t make a distinction and neither should we.
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