Audiobooks and Written Books are Different (thank god!)

Do audiobooks count as reading? Are audiobooks valid? On social media, readers are perpetually litigating this argument—you don’t need to look very hard or very far to find these debates, which tend to look near-identical in almost every round. The contours of the Audiobook Discourse appear, from what I can tell, to be about identity and self-perception as much as about any real engagement with either medium. The print book-defenders are depicted as the elitists, the intellectuals, the rigorous traditionalists. The audiobook-enjoyers are meanwhile imagined as the poptimists, the open-minded democratizers.

It’s far more interesting to actually treat the print book and the audiobook as two different—albeit linked—art forms, and to actually look closely at the nuances and gulfs between them rather than reflexively insisting upon their equal efficacy as tools to burnish a consumer’s reputation.

Reading a print book and listening to an audiobook are more similar than they are different. And I suppose, if my only intention was to take sides in the whole discourse, I’d leave it at that. But am I being obtuse if I confess that I don’t, honestly, understand the terms of the conversation? What do we mean when we say “count?” Valid to whom, and for what purpose? The whole debate seems to revolve less around the act of reading, and more around access to the social type of The Reader, who is understood as intelligent, moral, healthy, and generally good. Some people prefer audiobooks and feel that print readers have a monopoly on this persona, and are resentful and defensive about it; Others prefer print and enjoy feeling that they have a monopoly on the persona, and are resentful and defensive when others try to lay claim to it.

Dismissing the differences between the two forms, far from indicating respect for their creators and readers, is a dismissal of the forms themselves. The information is the same, the words are the same, people say. But art is not just about taking in information. We are not computers. Of course it matters whether we see a book or hear it! Art is an experience, not a hollow vessel packed with data points, and our senses are the mode through which we experience the world.

Moreover, some people argue, it’s actually ableist to point out a difference between these two forms, because some people (chiefly the blind and the visually-impaired) can only/mostly read audiobooks, while others (chiefly the deaf and hard of hearing) can only/mostly read print books. But, unless you are arguing that disability has no impact on an individual’s experience of the world, this is silly. Human perception is astonishingly and thrillingly various, determined by countless causes, among them disability. Diversity in individual readers interacts with diversity in artistic objects. Indeed, the fact that a blind person likely prefers audiobooks isn’t some damning reminder that audio and print readership are identical. Rather, it’s an obvious indicator of the differences between the two mediums. Depending on who you are and what your body is like, the forms are actually so different that you might literally only be able to enjoy one of them. Moreover, the way I experience an audiobook is probably very different from how, for instance, a person born entirely blind would experience an audiobook. I struggle with audiobooks partly because I long for some kind of visual engagement, but this likely would not trouble someone who doesn’t much use their sense of sight. Similarly, while I “hear” a voice in my head while I read a print book, a person born totally deaf would probably have an altogether different set of synesthetic reactions. I’m going to leave it at that, because the topic of disability and readership needs more space than I can give it here—but suffice it to say that, again, a reflexive insistence on sameness between print and audio ultimately shrugs off disability rather than treating it with real attention.

I tend to prefer print books over audio ones partly as a consequence of my own flawed attention span. When listening to an audiobook or podcast, I’ll often realize that I’ve let my attention wander and missed a few sentences, sometimes more. Then I have to decide whether it’s worthwhile to try and rewind to the place where my attention drifted, which requires a much more conscious effort than it does when reading a print book (all of which comes down to the specific form of a print book, with its easy-to-turn leaves. This is a major difference between a book and its predecessor, the scroll. Anyone who has interacted with scrolls knows that it takes a lot of time and work and effort to go back and forth between passages).

Whenever this happens, I think about one guest speaker who came to talk to my creative writing class in high school. She’d written in print, but she’d also worked in scripted radio (my memory fails me here, but I think it might have been an NPR show like This American Life). The speaker explained to us that she preferred writing for print rather than for audio. Why? Well, she said—in so many words—in print, the burden of attention falls on the reader. The writer needs only state something once. It’s the reader’s job to understand. If the reader’s attention drifts away, it’s on them to backtrack, retracing their visual steps until they’ve read the neglected segment. In contrast, on the radio, the burden of attention falls on the writer. The audio writer knows that listeners’ attention will wander. On traditional radio they cannot backtrack. On a podcast or an audiobook they technically can, but it’s difficult to do so. And so it falls to the writer to insert reminders and to repeat important information.

Viewed in this light, audiobooks are interesting because they are not, so to speak, scripted for listening. Neither are they straightforwardly direct descendants of oral storytelling, in which the lines between performer and audience blur, with the performer involving and responding to audiences, reworking their story off the cuff. Audiobooks are adaptations of existing print works. The makers of the audiobook are not generally at liberty to alter the text as they read. Therefore, audiobooks don’t contain the repetitions found in radio work. This has a few consequences. For starters, it just means that some print books work well when adapted to audio form while others don’t. 100 Years of Solitude, with its already-confusing cycling of names, its José Arcadio Buendías and José Arcadios and José Arcadio Segundos and so forth, would be devastatingly hard to follow in audio form.¹ Secondly, it means that a good audiobook performer might need to find creative and interesting ways to create variety and emphasis. Finally, though, this means that the reader is faced with an extraordinary burden of attention. They must follow along, keeping pace with the recording, without relying on the writer to repeat important elements of the story.

More broadly, of course, this all points to the fact that print and audio storytelling place the reader in two utterly different relationships with time and temporality. I love print books partly because they place me, as a reader, outside of clock-time, and in something that we can think of as line-time or page-time. As Claire-Louise Bennett writes in Checkout 19, a book that is in many ways a brilliant meditation on print itself:

“We enjoy turning the pages of the book and our anticipation of doing so is obviously fairly fervid and undermines our attention to such an extent that we can’t help but skim over the last couple of sentences on the right page without taking in a single word. Quite often when we make a start on the left page it doesn’t make a great deal of sense to us. No. No. No it doesn't. And it is only then, isn’t it, that we realize, somewhat reluctantly, that we didn’t quite read the last few lines of the previous page properly.”

In other words, the print book moves forward at whichever pace I choose to set for it, my own pacing interacting with the visual space of the page as well as with the shape of the narrative. Prose writing is special partly because the writer can, like the reader, manipulate time. In the moment between a gun going off and the bullet making contact, a writer can insert chapters of internal monologue (see Tristram Shandy, or Mrs. Dalloway). Or vice-versa: the author can boil a lifetime into a sentence, so that decades occupy just a second of the reader’s own time. But a print text allows the reader to mirror the writer, giving them the ability to manipulate time in turn. It’s like being alone in a spacious room. I can move around the architecture of the room in whichever direction and at whatever pace I want. I can labor over a sentence for minutes or speed through a page in seconds, I can skim, I can pause. I spoke earlier of my attention “drifting,” but this is somewhat unfair. Often, in print, when my attention diverges from the words on the page, it is because the words have prompted me to think something through. I take a moment to reflect on what I’ve read, to be reminded of a similar text or a related experience in my own life, and then return to the text, better off than I was before. Maybe because I live the rest of my life according to an external clock, I like the feeling of being freed from it, allowed to enter into a more internally-driven, fluid relationship to time itself.

Audiobooks, meanwhile, place the reader not in a spacious room but on a steadily moving train. The narrative progresses at its own pace, quite independently of the reader. In this way audiobooks achieve some of the excitement and provocation of live performance, in which the thrill comes partly from the sense of existing in shared time with others. Even with film and recorded music/books, which of course lack this live element, there is a sense of being along for the ride, handing over some of one’s agency to a performer, who will use our time the way they want to. Reading a print book can feel like being the only person in the world. Listening to an audiobook feels like following a friend through an unfamiliar landscape, maybe getting a little bit breathless. Keeping up is a pain, and part of the fun.

To extend the metaphor: the beckoning friend is, of course, the audiobook’s narrator. A print reader exists in a more direct relationship to the text (though that’s not to say it’s totally unmediated. It’s mediated by everything from font choice to cover design to mode of purchase, not to mention the countless editorial decisions made by agents and editors to shape the words themselves). But the audiobook reader much more overtly forms part of a triangle alongside the author and the narrator. The narrator, as I mentioned earlier, has their own choices to make. How should words be pronounced? What accent is appropriate to speak in? Should characters’ dialogue be conveyed in distinctive voices and, if so, should these voices be subtle or exaggerated? Should musical devices like internal rhyme and caesura be emphasized, and how so, and to what degree? In other words, the narrator takes on the role of the “voice in your head,” shouldering a task that, in a print context, falls directly to readers.

In this way, audiobooks are similar to literary translation. Translators and advocates for the form often describe works of literary translation, not as mere transmissions of existing texts, but as new artworks—adaptations. This movement to understand translation as a distinct art form, and translators as artists, has produced a (highly successful) campaign to name translators prominently on book covers, as well as in reviews and other contexts. When you read a translated novel, you aren’t—it’s true—getting an identical experience to the person reading the original. But you also aren’t necessarily getting an inferior experience, aiming and always failing to imitate the original. You’re reading a different, related work, because books are experiences rather than mere collections of information, and the experience is fundamentally shaped by the form and the language in which we receive it. Audiobooks, in a broad metaphorical sense, are translations.

The literary translator, the audiobook narrator, and the director adapting a book for the screen all have to ask similar questions. What best conveys the feeling of the original text: a highly literal “translation,” or a looser one? And what do we even mean, when we talk about the feeling of the text? Is the goal of the adapting artist to fade into the background, rendering themselves invisible? Or is it to reimagine and reshape? Should a translation feel “fluent,” so that you forget it’s been translated? Or is that fluency and ease dishonest, failing to acknowledge the fact that the text has been coaxed from one language or one form into another?

A world in which these two forms are not meaningfully different is a world in which experience itself is null, which is to say, a world without art and without humanity. Questions of literary quality and merit are important, but when we lose sight of the literary texts themselves and devolve into defensive squabbles about the quality and merit of the reader/consumer, we reject not just certain readers, but literature itself. Literature is not a club or a badge or an ideal. It is not an exercise in personal branding. It is, very simply, a collection of texts. Discussions of literature are worth our while only if we can actually pay attention to those texts: the words themselves, the objects through which they are expressed, and the sensory modes by which we, as readers, meet those words.

1. To be fair, this might intensify its effects. But it would definitely be different!