Do audiobooks count as reading?

Do audiobooks count as reading? And does it really matter? Why do some people seem to care so much about making this distinction? Where do the moral overtones surrounding reading that underlie this question come from? Arguments around this topic are often centered on the benefits of reading - and there are plenty, including educational, professional, psychological, social, and emotional. So, does the format we read in matter when it comes to the benefits we get from reading?  

Whether you've found yourself justifying your audiobook listening to someone as "real" reading, or you're on the other side and you think audiobooks don't count as reading, this episode will give you something to think about. 

Join us as we dive into this topic!

[Note: there is some background noise in this episode (Elizabeth clacking on her keyboard), but rest assured it doesn't persist in future episodes. Thanks for bearing with us as we learn! :)] 
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Books we're reading in this episode:

Love Marriage by Monica Ali
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Empire of Shadows (Throne of Glass) Series by Sarah J. Maas
The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston
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Sources (links provided when available!) listed in the order they appear in the episode:

• Irwin, William. "Reading Audio Books." Philosophy and Literature 33, no. 2 (2009): 358-368. doi:10.1353/phl.0.0057.
• Erica B. Michael, Timothy A Keller, Patricia A. Carpenter, and Marcel Adam Just. "fMRI Investigation of Sentence Comprehension by Eye and Ear: Modality Fingerprints on Cognitive Processes." Human Brain Mapping 13 (2001): 240, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6872122/. 
• N. Osaka et al. "The Neural Basis of Executive Function in Working Memory: An fMRI Study Based on Individual Differences." Neuroimage 21 (2004): 623–31, https://www.academia.edu/download/49498790/The_neural_basis_of_executive_function_i20161010-14367-1wyalxy.pdf. 
• Winqwist, T. "Reading with Your Ears : A comparative study of reading and listening to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Dissertation)." (2010), http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-5148.
• Schulz, M.  (2022). "Listening or reading?: Rethinking ableism in relation to the senses and (acoustic) text." In Techniques of Hearing (pp. 102-113). Routledge.
• Moyer, Jessica E. “What Does It Really Mean to ‘Read’ a Text?” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 55 no. 3 (2011): 253–56. https://doi.org/10.1002/JAAL.00

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Intro and outro music: "The Chase," by Aves.

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Read on!

Transcript

[All Books Aloud intro and theme music]

Martha: Hey Liz. I almost tried to say Elizabeth, but it already felt too weird.

Elizabeth: No, you don't have to call me Elizabeth. You're one of the only people who's allowed to call me Liz.

But hi Martha.

Martha: I live in Alaska and Liz lives in Oregon, but I'm here visiting, so this is gonna be a rare occurrence where I'm sitting in your kitchen recording a podcast

Elizabeth: Yeah, usually we'll do these long distance.

Martha: So, Liz, tell me, what are you reading right now?

Elizabeth: What am I reading right now? So I usually have at least two and sometimes three books going at the same time. So, I just finished a book called Love Marriage by Monica Ali, who is a British woman writer who, I really liked that book and I started, a new book called Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, which I am also really enjoying.

At the same time, I am listening to a book called The Marlow Murder Club,

Martha: Hmm.

Elizabeth: and I can't remember the name of the author. I probably should have had that before we started. , and then also, My husband Alex, is reading The Lord of the Rings out loud. To me, that's like our, thing that we do instead of watching TV sometimes.

So I actually have a lot of books going right now.

Martha: At once. Yeah.

Elizabeth: Which I never used to do, but lately I've been doing more. What are you reading right now?[00:02:00] 

Martha: So right now I am reading the Sarah J Maas Throne of Glass series on Audible. So I'm listening to those. I finished the ACOTAR before the Throne of Glass series and I didn't wanna have a Sarah J Maas book hang over, so I immediately started

Elizabeth: Ohh. Book hangovers, the worst..

Martha: The throne of glass. I know. So I'm on like book four or five, I think it's called Empire of Shadows. And it's really good. And then I just finished reading my paper novel, the Dead Romantics, and it was so good. I just flew through it. I read most of it on the plane ride down here. The author is, I should again, we should have looked this up. Ashley is her first name. Poston. Poston, something like that.

Elizabeth: I'll look it up and tell you, but can you tell me while I'm Googling it what the ACOTAR

Martha: ACOTAR. Okay.

Elizabeth: I see that a lot on social media.

Martha: On [00:03:00] book Tok. The book Tok girlies, shorten it. Okay. So ACOTAR, stands for a Court of Thorns and Roses. It's first book in that series by . Sarah J Maas. So that's how they shorten it?

Elizabeth: Got it. And the Dead Romantics is by Ashley Poston.

Martha: Yes. Ashley Poston. And I loved how at the back of the book she put her comfort reads. She has like a list of comfort reads that she put on one of the last pages of the novel. And so it's given me ideas of more books I want to read because I figure if I loved her book so much, I probably like what she reads too.

Elizabeth: Yeah. Definitely. I love that idea. Um, and I also looked up the Marlow Murder Club. It's actually a series which I am happy to find because I've really been enjoying it. And it's by Robert Thorogood, which I actually was surprised to find out that it was written by a man. I usually gravitate towards books that are written by women, just [00:04:00] sort of naturally, not on purpose, but , maybe that's a topic that we can explore at one point.

Martha: Yeah, that's definitely a good topic for another episode, but today we have something in mind that we wanna delve into for our first episode. Do you wanna introduce it, Liz?

Elizabeth: Yeah, sure. I mean, this topic is really central to what this podcast is about, like the impetus for it, right? Which is do audio books count as reading are audio books, reading the same as reading a paper book? I mean, yes.

Martha: Yeah. Yeah, I'll answer that. We'll make it the shortest podcast ever. Yes. 

Elizabeth: Yeah. Episode done. 

Martha: That's my opinion, done and dusted.

Elizabeth: But it is something that we wanted to talk about and sort of get, out of the way early, right. Because. It is something that we both have, sort of run into this question in our, in our lives, right? In our personal lives. I've definitely [00:05:00] run into it in my professional life.

I do research into reading, as part of my scholarship with , being an academic librarian. So what has your experience been with this question of do audiobooks count as reading? 

Martha: From some people I know, it's been like, oh, well you listen to it. That's not the same. It's just not the same. And I don't even know why. It's just not the same. And I never really cared to debate it because I felt like to me it was the same and 

it's not like I missed anything. I knew the whole story. I understood the book. So it was something I kind of let it roll off my back. It didn't really bother me. But then it must have at least a little bit because I brought it up to you one day. I don't remember how I prefaced it.

Maybe you remember, but is it the same? Am I still a book lover if I'm listening to them rather than reading them on paper?

Elizabeth: Yeah, I'm gonna out you a little [00:06:00] bit that it was in a context being a little bit self-deprecating. We were talking about books and you were like, well, I mean, I'm not as much of a reader as you are. And I was like, wait a minute.

Didn't you read like five audio books in the last week or something? And you were like, well, but it's not really the same, is it? Or like, is it the same as reading? And I was like, yes. My, you know, librarian Hot Take is very much, I know we say in this intro that our hot takes are like sassy, millennial takes, but like my takes are actually more like librarian takes where I put on my professional hat and I'm like, as a librarian, I can tell you.

, but I think that it, it's really interesting because it does have this sort of, Moral, almost overtone to this question. Like does it count? Count for what? Is it the same as reading? Why do those people care if it's the same as reading or not? What is it about it?

Martha: Maybe it's something to [00:07:00] do with how quickly you read or how skilled you are at reading, or because reading's seen as being hard and arduous. You know, like if you read five books on paper a month, wow. You must be, you must read a lot or you must be a really fast reader. I don't know.

Elizabeth: Yeah, and I mean I will admit to, , a little bit of snobbery in this area. In my much earlier days, I would say before I went to library school, if someone had asked me, which why would they, before I was a librarian and have asked me this, but I think before I was a librarian, if someone had asked me if it's the same, I would've said no, based only on my anecdotal experience, because I didn't like audiobooks.

I didn't feel like they. I just didn't like them. I just have always been kind of like a Luddite, like I like things that are, you know, I like historical things, you know, all, all like, sort of things like that. 

Martha: Are, are you saying you're a purist? Is that what it is? Like a book [00:08:00] purist,

Elizabeth: I mean, certainly not anymore, but I think that there was a time where that probably would've been my. Answer, but mostly because I just didn't have a lot of experience with audiobooks and also audiobooks have gotten a lot better in recent years and I've been a librarian for 10 years,

so before I was a librarian.

Martha: that's like a whole nother episode we can get into.

Elizabeth: Yeah. That's something that we will talk about. Yeah. Every time we talk, we come up with like three more topics for the podcast. , So I would say that's my personal sort of take before I was a librarian, but since I've been a librarian, the way that I mostly came across this question is related to what you were just saying, which is, , I do a lot of research into reading and my research is qualitative research, meaning that I'm more interested in interviewing people or doing focus groups and getting.

Their, thoughts on something in their own words than I am in counting things basically, quantitative research is where you're counting things and you're coming up with statistics and, qualitative research is where you interview people and you get [00:09:00] their thoughts. So when I interview people about reading and specifically leisure reading is what I, am most interested in in my research.

 People will always say, without any prompting from me, , oh, I know that I should be reading more, or I wish I read more. Or, you know, I like you were saying like it's, it's something that's seen as arduous, but like good for you somehow,

Martha: Like eating your vegetables.

Elizabeth: Yeah, exactly. It's sort of like reading is vegetables and you know, watching TV or scrolling.

Social media is chocolate and so obviously. You like chocolate better, right? Unless you know you're sort of an outlier and you like vegetables better. That's sort of how it comes across as something that's good for you, but that you don't necessarily want to do. And that really bothers me.

Not in the sense that I'm annoyed with the people, but just it bothers me that that is the overtone of reading. Because to me, obviously I'm a librarian, I'm a writer. Books are life, you know, should be a [00:10:00] tattoo on my arm. And I just feel like it's such a mistake that we've made as a society that that's the place that reading has because it should be something that is, you know, joyful and fun.

And of course it is to people who love to read and also it has so many benefits. Any type of reading and reading, any type of book, there are just so many benefits that come with it. You know, I won't, I told you before we started recording this one that I'm gonna try not to dork out too much on, like the research, a aspect of it, but there are so many benefits to any type of reading.

You know, your reading comprehension goes up, your ability to communicate with people goes up, it increases your empathy in some studies. Like there just is no downside to reading.

Martha: Well, and, to be quite honest, some genres are not even made to be taken seriously necessarily. Like they are purely for entertainment. there's nothing wrong with reading a book and feeling like it's chocolate. Right? Which I guess that could be a whole other [00:11:00] episode about why some genres get a bad rap.

Elizabeth: Yeah. Oh my God. Don't even get me started on romance and the way that romance gets denigrated. But it's actually, yeah, I, I mean, I said, don't get me on my soapbox, but then I immediately jumped onto it. That should definitely be a topic in the future. But yeah. I mean, why can't reading be fun? Why can't it be chocolate? , it's also this idea of like, Real reading, like somehow if it is easy or fun or compulsive or addicting or distracting, it can't be real reading, right? Because real reading isn't those things. So it gets a little grim. Like why, why isn't reading those things? It is for some people. it's really one of my pet peeves because the way that we imbue reading with all this, like serious weight and talk about it as a difficult chore is part of the reason that I think. We are seeing less of it with young people and that is a little bit debated whether we actually are seeing less of it with young people. And I think that [00:12:00] some of it does come down to young people are reading in different formats, but certainly people overall read less now than they did in the past because there are more, there's more variety of things to do, right?

And it's 

Martha: And we're just busier in life in general.

Elizabeth: yes. But it's just bad news all around when people read less because reading actually is good for you, like I was just saying. And, but it's also a fun and joyful thing that, you know, can be a pastime that you

enjoy. 

Martha: And I know for me, being in my profession or even before I started doing real estate, when I used to do hair, I just didn't feel like I had time to read five books a month necessarily. But when I listened to audio books, I listen to them , well, at this point it's almost a problem because I no longer listen to like music or you know, my favorite podcast as much because I'm too busy listening to all my books.

But I listen to them when I am [00:13:00] getting ready for work, putting on my makeup, doing the dishes, walking the dog, all of that downtime, I can be listening to a book, whereas, You know, when I'm reading, it's typically in bed, at night, before I go to bed. And so there's just not as much opportunity for me to read paper books.

So I get through more of them. I listen to more stories. I just feel like that's, how could that be not as good, you know, so I've kind of gotten over that stigma a little bit, but I think it's important that we're talking about it cuz there's probably a lot of people like me out there.

Elizabeth: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what you were just saying, the way you were describing reading and how it like keeps you from doing other things, it's so funny cuz it strikes me as exactly the way that people who I interview talk about the things that they do that aren't reading and that they feel like they should do less of and in favor of reading. , so it does just go to show you that like,

Martha: You can have it all.

Elizabeth: can be something, right? It actually [00:14:00] can be something that is , that compulsive. I also, on the flip side, I mean this is related, I don't think it's getting into a different topic, but I hate it when p any type of reading is described as a guilty pleasure.

 What you were just describing, you could almost, you didn't describe it this way, but you could almost see it, it be like, well, audiobooks are my , guilty pleasure. Like I love listening to them and you know, I

Martha: Well, I almost did do that cuz I was like, oh, I don't listen to as much music. I don't listen to my favorite podcast as much. So I did kind of do that.

Elizabeth: yeah. Yeah. I just, I hate that phrase. No reading should induce guilt. All reading is good. Not doing it also shouldn't induce guilt. Like I think that that, you know, is a self-perpetuating bad thing. Guilt just shouldn't be involved at all when it comes to reading, I'll argue that until I'm blue in the face.

Martha: Yeah. Similarly, you know, and this is like a whole other road, we don't have to go down, but , if we're relating it to chocolate and vegetables, there's nothing wrong with a little chocolate now and [00:15:00] then, so,

Elizabeth: Right.

 For most of human history, and I mean, obviously, you know, Let's acknowledge our positionality we are white women who live in America.

So , clearly Western civilization is the position that we're coming from. But in all cultures, this was the case that books were experienced out loud. I mean, they were read out loud, you know, the Illiad, the Odyssey , Beowulf you know, people heard those stories out loud and even after the invention of the printing press, books were expensive, , and not everyone could afford them.

And so often, The person who had the book would read them out loud to themselves and to others as a form of entertainment. So it's really only recently that humans have decided that silent reading from a page is the only true and right way to interact with stories.

Martha: , Before you even mentioned that , they were expensive when they first started being printed on a printing press. I mean, not everyone could read, that's why they were read aloud. They were read aloud to people who didn't know how to read. [00:16:00] And I'm sure some of that still exists today. I mean, we could pull up the statistics for that, I'm sure.

If we wanted to see, the typical reading level for. Even the US is probably a lot lower than what most people think it is. And so audiobooks, , although it does take some skill to learn how to listen actively and not miss what you're listening to, are more accessible for people who couldn't read otherwise.

Elizabeth: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Audiobooks are more accessible for all sorts of people., which is one of the things that the academic research into this area actually talks about a lot. The other thing I feel like is important about the history of reading to realize is that, this is just constantly changing and evolving, 

 humans change the way that they see things and see the world and see each other. So the novel when it was for first. Created, you know, whatever, people can debate what the earliest novel was. But, [00:17:00] it was seen as a low form of entertainment. Like it was reviled by educated people that it's, it, it was something unworthy of reading, 

it was a low form of entertainment. versus how different things are now. Like, oh, well you have to read a paper novel. And, you know, literary novels are sort of seen as the peak of,

of, you know, sophisticated culture. And also things like, you know, authors have always traveled around and given public readings of their books, 

 there's something about the book, even when it's meant to be read silently to yourself. That is a performance , stories are stories and a performance of that story go hand in hand.

Martha: Yeah. Some of my favorite audio books are ones that are read by the author because you can hear the exact tone. That they meant the book to be read in, which of course that's not taking anything away from someone reading it on paper and bringing their own voice and tone to it, because that's part of reading too, right?

Is using your own [00:18:00] imagination. , but there's just something to be said about an author reading their book and listening to it as an audio book that I think is really cool and some of the best ones. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think you just hit the nail on the head. It's different, right. I wish that we could get away from, and I hope by the end of this podcast we can agree that we're getting away from this idea of is it the same or is one better or is the other one better? Like they're just different experiences and they're both good, I think.

And. Really when you look at the academic research into this area, that kind of is what you have to come away with because it's really inconsistent in terms of how it would answer this question. So I don't know if we're ready to get into that, that part of the conversation. I'm such a dork and such a, such an academic, I'm raring to get into the research on, into this.

Martha: No, I think we should get into it.

Elizabeth: So , I did. Not what I would call an extensive literature review, but I did for a couple of weeks look at the literature in this area [00:19:00] about, audio books versus reading silently to yourself, which is not my area of expertise. Like I said, my research is into recreational reading.

 My degree is in information science, and so I'm coming from the perspective of a librarian and I'm talking to mostly students about their. Recreational reading life and, trying to make a case for why libraries need to have recreational books in their collections because there are all sorts of benefits.

So my angle on this is sort of slightly different from research into, you know, what is reading

Martha: Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth: the definition of what is reading, and are formats the same. , what I found is that the literature is really inconsistent and mostly I think that that is because it's researched in a lot of different fields, so all these researchers are coming at the topic from a different perspective and they care about different things.

Right. So there are, there are studies in psychology, there are studies in neurology that are talking about. The specific brain, [00:20:00] activity that happens when you read. There are articles in philosophy that are dealing with the more, what is reading,

Martha: Right.

Elizabeth: of existential, there's a articles in sociology, articles in information science that are written by librarians.

So whether you say these readings are the same kind of thing, depends on what you care about, right? So if you care about comprehension, Of the book and like you were saying, an engagement in the book and the experience of reading. The answer really seems to be yes, they are the same for all intents and purposes.

If you're interested more in the very specific functions of the mind and body, while we do each thing, the answer is a little more complicated and it's sort of maybe yes, maybe no. There are similar, but there are some differences. Are they differences that make enough of a difference that we can say for sure that they're different things.

Martha: I mean, that makes sense. 

Elizabeth: As with science, usually the answer is not really.

Martha: And it makes so much sense because we're using different senses, different [00:21:00] parts of our brain to, consume the books. So that makes complete sense to me.

Elizabeth: Right. And people who have learning disabilities or people who are, blind or low sighted and their experience of reading, being mostly audio and obviously. I hope no one, even the people who, come up to you and say, oh, well it's not the same to listen to a book.

I hope wouldn't say that to a blind person, that they hadn't really read a book. But what's actually really interesting is that in the same way that different people have different learning styles naturally because of whatever, you know, set of factors are at play in their life. People with low or no vision also experience. , reading, listening to a book different from a person who does have that eyesight, so, , I read an article by, a blind sociologist named Nicholas Schultz. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly. it was [00:22:00] just published in 2022. He pointed out a lot about the inherent ableism, , in the way that most of the literature treats this topic, including some of the studies that, I looked at in full transparency.

 But. Just said that,, there are those different ways that your senses work in everyone, but also specifically in people who are blind. So it's really important that those people are also doing research and talking about their own experiences and that people who are sighted are not just talking about, oh, it must be this way for you.

And one of the things that he talked about is part of reading is, , a something called sub vocalization, which is when you're reading silently to yourself, your muscles. That you would use to speak are actually subtly working while you're reading

Martha: Hmm. That's so fascinating.

Elizabeth: Yeah, so the speech muscles are, are working, and this is something that apparently since the 1980s cognitive, , psychologists have been measuring this, the movement of those muscles.

And so the process of sort of translating that print into [00:23:00] sound like your inner voice inside your head is something that, that researchers have pointed to as being really important for. The understanding of texts and like reflect, being reflective about texts. And what Schultz is saying is that he argues that the inner voice can be used in that same way when listening specifically that blind people because they rely on that for comprehension.

, that happens in a different way for them and, and. Is more is replicating that act of reading more closely than someone who can see. Right. And in his own re his own research, he talks about using computer read text. For exactly the opposite reason of what you were just saying about liking to listen to audiobooks read by the author because computer read text doesn't imbue any meaning into the text.

And then he has to repeat it to himself in his mind to get that meaning out of it. . And also he talks about the speed at which it's played. , plays a large part in that. So there's a ton in that, but it's just, I thought [00:24:00] that that study specifically was really interesting.

Martha: That's so interesting. And I wonder how,, that is probably about to change with leaps and bounds with AI and that sort of thing. It probably will no longer be like a robotic voice in those settings where they were using a computer to narrate like that. And the other thought I had was, I'm sure you've seen on social media lately, I mean I say lately, it's kind of come up.

 Within the last few years, it kind of comes and goes where they talk about not everyone has an inner voice, an inner monologue. Some people see in pictures essentially, which I don't understand cuz I a hundred percent have an inner monologue. so I wonder how that, how listening to audiobooks affects their perception with their, you know, inner.

Whatever is going on in

Elizabeth: I wonder too, I didn't see anything about that in the literature. I will say that. Again, [00:25:00] I didn't do what I would call a systematic literature review. I wanna make sure that no academics listening to this like, come for me.

Martha: No.

Elizabeth: I love the, I love the idea that I'm already imagining our, our vast audience.

 But it doesn't seem like there is a ton of research in this area, honestly. , you know, one of the main articles that gets referenced is actually from philosophy. This, , scholar whose last name is Irwin, brings together a lot of the research to that point. but that was only in the, I wanna say early two thousands

Martha: Wow.

Elizabeth: That he wrote that article.

Oh, 2009.

 And so, you know, the, the 2022 study by Schultz that I was just talking about, obviously is about. 13 years later, but still references a lot of the same articles that Irwin does. And so it just doesn't seem like it's a huge area of research. , which means that we, there's a lot that we just actually don't know,

Martha: and audiobooks have changed a lot since then, I would say.

Elizabeth: Yeah. So, You know, in terms of the, people who have [00:26:00] an inner voice or who see pictures, they're gonna have a different experience. People who have different abilities are gonna have a different experience. people with different learning styles or different reading styles, audio books will work better for some people than others.

Just like print books do. , and that's the case, even if we're not talking about format, one of my favorite, teachers in graduate school, her name is Nancy Pearl. She's sort of , The closest that librarians have to a famous person, Nancy Pearl. She's like a rockstar in our world. And I feel like I was so lucky to get to take two classes from her, but she always said that no two readers ever read the same book.

Because all reading, no matter what format you're doing it in, is filtered through your own lens, your own life, your own experiences, your perspective., so it's always gonna be different for different people no matter what format you're reading it in. And so it just feels like, again, I come back to,

Martha: Yeah. We don't know enough.

Elizabeth: and why does it matter?

Like, 

Martha: does it matter? Yeah.

Elizabeth: is gonna be different anyway.

Martha: Let me ask you, [00:27:00] from the perspective of someone who writes books, does that kind of drive you crazy that we all have our own perception of what your book is, 

Elizabeth: I mean, I wouldn't say drive me crazy because to be clear, I haven't actually published a book yet, so haven't had the experience 

Martha: Not yet.

Elizabeth: of a lot of other people reading my book and taking things from it that I didn't mean to put into it. When you're writing a book, it's your personal private thing and you sort of show it to one person, show it to another person, right? But then when it's published, you're putting it out into the world. It's not yours anymore. And there's actually , a whole literary criticism

 theory called reader response theory. That is all about, the meaning of the books are created by the readers. It doesn't actually matter what the author meant to put in there. Like the meaning is created through reading it. So , whether you agree with that or not, that is a school of thought when it comes to literary criticism.

But yeah, that is something I think about sometimes because when you publish a book, you do just have [00:28:00] to let it go, let it fly. , the golden rule of authors is to not read the reviews. Don't read what people say about your book, the good reviews or the bad reviews, because it just doesn't matter at that point cuz it's not yours anymore.

You've given it to the world.

Martha: Yeah.

We kind of touched on this earlier too, but I wanna revisit and see if it's worth delving into a little bit deeper, but, The thought that reading a book on paper is more active and listening is more passive, and that's why maybe it's seen as not the same.

Elizabeth: Yeah. . So in the Irwin article, he does posit that argument that many people have that claim that listening, , isn't reading because it doesn't, , involve the same sort of cognitive processes, right?

Which is sort of what you're alluding to, active versus passive. , so he says, there's a couple of quotes that I'll read from Irwin. , there's no general agreement in [00:29:00] the field of neurology about the precise relation between reading and listening comprehension. , there are a number of subtle differences in the cognitive processing underlying listening versus reading comprehension, but the subtlety of the differences suggests that there are similar but distinguishable regions of the brain involved in the semantic processing of written and spoken words.

So, essentially yes, there are some small differences in, The processes in the brain that are going on, but the fact that they're only subtly different, means that it seems like it's the same enough for Irwin, at least to be able to say,, that they're the same. So the other thing that Irwin gives as an example in his article is, again, not that the audience for this podcast is necessarily academics, but if you've ever been to an academic conference, something that happens there, and he talks about this, Irwin talks about this in the article, which is why I'm bringing it up, is that, academics read their papers out loud.

So this actually doesn't usually happen at [00:30:00] librarian conferences. We give presentations that are a little bit more interactive, but at. A conference, you know, like a philosophy conference or a literature conference. The scholars will write their papers and they will read them, literally stand up on a stage and read their paper. And the audience is listening to that. And Irwin is like, If you've ever tried to listen to an academic paper, I can tell you right now that that listening is not passive. It's actually very difficult. And when I, I mean, I can't actually even imagine doing that because when I need to read an academic article, I very often need to print it out because I'm not quick enough to, to get it through listening. . Listening is actually more difficult in that case,, which is, doesn't necessarily prove anything. But just to say that it depends on what you're listening to. You can't just make a blanket statement that listening is passive and reading is active.

Martha: And actually I would argue that learning how to listen actively is a skill [00:31:00] that you have to hone and you're not necessarily great at it in the beginning, You know, if you start listening to a book or a podcast or whatever, you might notice your mind wandering and you have to bring it back just like with a conversation.

 The best listeners. Are actually listening to what the speaker is saying and not just thinking about what they want to say next. . And it's kind of the same with audiobooks. It's a skill that you can hone over time of really paying attention to the book, really trying to pick up on the nuances of the text and digesting that as a reader that can be pretty active.

Elizabeth: definitely, and actually you just put your finger, I think, I didn't realize this before, but you just put your finger on why I didn't like audiobooks before. So I feel like I have to confess, confess myself to you. In that earlier phase of my life when I would say that I didn't like audiobooks, part of the reason is because I would put an audiobook [00:32:00] on and I would get distracted and I would not be listening.

And all of a sudden I would come back to it and be like, oh, I don't know what just happened in the last five minutes. , and I would have to go back. But instead of realizing that as a failure on my part, I was like, oh, audio books

Martha: right. 

Elizabeth: You know, whatever. But then actually most recently when you have, , sort of convinced me to give audiobooks another try, and I've gotten into them, , I, I started out intentionally only listening to them when I was walking.

So I wasn't doing really anything else. Right. I wasn't driving, so I wasn't having to pay attention to the road. I was just walking and listening to the audiobook

Martha: Just mindless task, 

Elizabeth: and I, I mean, I will tell you I enjoy it so much now and I can listen to them now when I'm driving. I can listen to them when I'm doing other things because I have practiced it, like you said, and it's something that I've gotten used to doing.

So yeah, even just that anecdotal experience,, underscores what you were just saying about it being something that you can get better at.[00:33:00] 

Martha: I love it. My ADD brain loves it because it helps me get through those mundane tasks that I would put off or procrastinate on doing because I just don't want to do them. But if my brain has something else to do to keep it busy while I'm doing those tasks, it's really helpful, which is not really what this episode is about, but just an aside for other people like me.

Elizabeth: Yes, and also it is what this episode is about because , what you're describing is something that you think of as candy or chocolate. To go back to our, our analogy earlier that you're using to get through a task that you think of as vegetables, reading for you as the chocolate that you use to get through those tasks, which I think is great.

Again, I'm just pro, any type of reading all the books, all the reading. So I would say the last thing, the last sort of category of the research that I do want to make sure to talk about is also related to this, which is there are. There's another subset of [00:34:00] studies, again, not very many. The main one that I found was from 2011 and was done by a librarian,, and reading researchers really similar to, to what I do.

 But there are other studies as well about sort of the difference in interest and engagement and comprehension between the formats. So this 2011 study by the librarian,, looked at college students. And had them read four to six pages of print, ebook and listening. So the same amount in each format.

 Different books, , all fiction, , by the look of it. , and the order in which the texts were read and the modality that they read them in were all random , to try to control for as much as possible. And basically she found there was no statistically significant difference across the formats.

In comprehension. Participants level of comprehension was the same regardless of the format. There was also no difference in engagement. , , the book that was liked the least, the least popular book was equally equally not popular among all three [00:35:00] formats and that was consistent.

Um and so her conclusion was like, for what I'm interested in again, right? It depends on what the researcher is interested in.

Martha: Right.

Elizabeth: The experience of reading is essentially the same across all the formats. There was one study I found that , was actually a dissertation, so it hadn't been peer reviewed, but it was of much younger children, I wanna say seventh graders.

And it found that, actually, it was one of the only ones that I found that said that the comprehension was lower with audiobooks, but the person gave a very large caveat that , These are children that have a hard time paying attention. So literally it's what we were just talking

about. They have not practiced Yes.

Listening and paying attention to something. And so it was easier for them to comprehend when you put something in front of them and were like, okay, now read this. , but for the most part, and I mean again, you know, it's no surprise that that was a librarian. And that's also what I'm interested in most is [00:36:00] that level of engagement and comprehension.

 But when it comes to those factors,, there aren't differences between the reading, the format of reading. So I feel like that is an important thing to, to make sure to get out. 

Martha: That's very validating.

Elizabeth: I hope that it is validating not just for, for you and me to sort of validate, you know, this isn't just us. Giving an excuse for our confirmation bias, , we both like reading audio books, so we're gonna decide that they're good. But I do think that it's important that, people's reading is validated because it is an unalloyed good reading, right? And reading in all formats, reading in all genres.

Like I already said. It's just good for people to do. So I hope that this podcast in this episode is validating for people to just. You know, follow your bliss and read,

Martha: Yes.

Elizabeth: read however it works for you.

Martha: I love it.

Elizabeth: yeah, I just get so dorky when it comes to, to the research. It's my favorite thing. 

 Something [00:37:00] also from Irwin, was about,, books that are translated from one language to another. The example he gave is, , The Brothers Karamazov, right? Uh, Dostoevsky. He's like, is my experience of reading that book much more impoverished for not having read it in Russian probably.

Martha: Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth: Right. I didn't read it in its native language, but like would someone tell me that I hadn't read the book if I read it in English instead of Russian?

Probably not.

Right. 

Martha: Probably not.

Elizabeth: So it

Martha: You don't need learn Russian to read that book.

Elizabeth: to read that book,

Martha: It's a hard language to learn.

Elizabeth: Yeah. And , just think about how impoverished our experience as readers would be if we were only allowed to read the books that were written in our own language, right? Like there's, there's so many. Wonderful books that have been written in other languages that I'm grateful that I got to read.

And it also just goes back to, humans choose the thing that they wanna be picky about, the thing they wanna be snobby about in that moment, , which is a totally normal human thing to [00:38:00] do, but , we need to recognize that that's what's going on. It's not something that's inherent, it's something that, you know, society moves forward, it changes, it evolves, its thinking, evolves when it comes to all sorts of topics.

And reading is definitely one of them.

Martha: Yeah, definitely.

Elizabeth: But you know, people are different. Audiobooks might not be for everyone, but if they are for you,

Martha: Read on my friends.

Elizabeth: read on. I like it.

Martha: . Well, thanks Liz for talking about this with me today. I think it's the perfect topic to get our podcast started, and I'm excited to see what's to come

Elizabeth: Yeah. Thanks for letting me ramble on.

Martha: Of course any day. What would it be without your research? Well, thanks for joining us, everyone. We hope you enjoyed this conversation and make sure you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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