Several months ago I read an interesting article in The Atlantic, “Tolstoy and Chill,” about the alleged passivity of listening to audiobooks compared with the allegedly more active reading of textual versions of the same books. I will admit at the outset that I listen to very few audiobooks; this is in stark contrast to Jani for whom, if I wish to speak with her when she’s away from her computer, I need to first look carefully at her ears to see if earbuds are jammed into the holes (because they frequently are). While I’ll talk later in the article about my reasons for not listening to audiobooks, I’ll note here that they differ from some of the objections given by many people.
What is the main objection? Sam Apple answers:
Audio made books so relaxing and pleasurable that a listener couldn’t engage critically with the text in a way a serious reader should. Listening to literature, the essayist and critic Sven Birkerts argued in his 1994 book, The Gutenberg Elegies, was like ‘being seduced, or maybe drugged,’ a very different experience from ‘deep reading,’ which Birkerts characterized as ‘the slow and meditative possession of a book.’
He continues, “Audiobooks were suspect because they turned reading into an easier, more passive experience. As the Irish novelist and critic Colm Tóibín once put it, the difference between reading a book and listening to a book was ‘like the difference between running a marathon and watching a marathon on TV.’”
Other objections involve the production and presentation of the audiobooks as media: poor audio quality reduces the listening experience (and, for students, comprehension), or the style of the reader can be distracting. Related, the expense of producing and distributing quality recordings can increase inequity by limiting the availability of audiobooks for lower-income listeners.
There are, of course, counter-arguments to be made to these points (and, in contrast to my personal problems with audiobooks, Jani intends to write an article explaining what she loves about the medium). For example, a good narrator can enhance the experience of encountering text through audio. Farhad Majoo, describing his appreciation for the narration of Caroline Lee, says, “like the best audiobook narrators, her delivery is endlessly malleable, shifting nimbly across accent, register and tone to create a sense that one is inside the story rather than peering in from the outside.” Audiobooks (and other multimedia) are also generally neither better nor worse than textual books for retaining information; a recent study found videos, podcasts and online articles are equally effective in conveying memorable information on nutrition.
And yet, for my own personal—and therefore entirely anecdotal—use, audiobooks are distinctly inferior to textual books for reading and intellectually processing the non-fiction which constitutes the overwhelming majority of my book consumption. Researchers indicate that the cognitive demands of reading fiction, as opposed to those of reading non-fiction, make the former better suited for a spoken medium; while popular-level non-fiction—particularly with a relatively linear narrative like memoirs and some history—could be easily understood and remembered from an audiobook, I think it’s inarguable that it would be easier to comprehend and remember Oliver Twist presented via audiobook than it would Hegel’s philosophical opus The Phenomenology of Spirit.
The issue for me, as Daniel T. Willingham points out in Apple’s article, is that textual books make it much easier to stop and think while reading. I can pause an audio file about as easily as I can bookmark a page, but if I spend more than a moment thinking about a point it is much easier to re-contextualize my thoughts and the book itself with a textual document, where I can quickly scan the previous sentences to re-familiarize myself with the argument before continuing. With an audiobook, by contrast, I am forced to jump back precisely to the moment where I left the narrator…perhaps even in the middle of a word itself.
The issue becomes even more acute if I wish to actively and directly interact with the text. With a textual document I can highlight a passage, write a note or annotation in the margin, or with some digital publications even create a link from that passage to another passage in the book…or to another work altogether. The most I can currently do with an audiobook is mark down the time in the audio file for which I have a thought, and then record those thoughts in a separate file. Finding and re-reading sections of a book is likewise vastly simpler in a textual document than the tortuous process of finding a previously-heard section of an audiobook.
Of course, I readily acknowledge my use case is unique to researchers and writers; your average reader has neither the need nor interest in pausing a novel to find and read the latest journal articles on that passage. I know I would derive far greater pleasure listening to Mick Herron’s latest Slough House novel on audiobook than I would Hegel (granted, only a sadist—or a truly unhinged philosopher—would listen to a Hegel audiobook). My point nonetheless stands: I am unlikely to ever contemplate—much less research—an event in a spy novel, but I do read and reference arguments in Hegel’s work. In the end, probably 95 percent of my reading would be far less effective if I attempted to make audiobook versions central to the process.
At the same time, though, there is certainly a place for listening to audiobooks, even for a die-hard scholar and publisher. That roughly five percent of my reading which is fiction might well be engaged—and, in doing it this way, actually increased—while doing chores or lying in bed, slowly unwinding in preparation for sleep. Apple makes the argument,
The true promise of the audiobook, I’ve come to think, may be that it brings the momentum of television and film to literature. By propelling us forward and keeping the intellect a little bit at bay, the audiobook allows the novel, too, to be ‘just what it is.’ Listening is a more passive experience than reading, yes, but, for many, it’s also a more relaxing and pleasurable experience. And the pleasure can’t be overlooked.
Now that I think about it, I really should try listening to the audiobook version of Bad Actors.
Image: Young woman walking on the street listening to music on her ear bud headphone (Source).
