Listening Isn’t Less Than Reading

Narrated by Editor-in-Chief Kat Jackson

Every few months, the debate resurfaces. Someone posts, “Listening to an audiobook doesn’t count as reading.” The comments fill with passionate opinions. Teams are chosen. People dig in.

And every time, I find myself asking the same question:

Why are we still having this conversation?

If you sit with a novel for ten hours, following its plot, getting to know its characters, laughing at its humor, crying through its heartbreaking moments, and learning from what an author has to say, you’ve experienced that book. Whether those words reached you through your eyes or your ears doesn’t change that fact.

Reading has never been about moving your eyes across a page. It’s about engaging with an author’s ideas. The medium isn’t the point, the story is.

In fact, audiobooks ask us to do something readers have always done: use our imaginations to build a world. A great creator – author OR narrator – presents these worlds to us via words, and then we get to decide how they look to us.

A narrator doesn’t show you the talking cat, they describe her and voice her words, her attitude. They don’t hand you the emotion, they give you the action or the description, and you get to feel some way about it. You’re still building the world. You’re still connecting with the characters. You’re still making meaning from language.

That’s the literary experience. Different formats create different experiences, and they’re all valid. Yes, they’re different but different doesn’t mean lesser. In fact, audiobooks add something uniquely human to the experience. A great narrator brings rhythm, pacing, emotion, and character to a performance. A producer shapes that performance. An engineer captures it live in the studio. A sound designer builds an auditory world for the words to live in. It’s a collaboration that honors the author’s words while adding another layer of artistry.

That’s not cheating, that’s storytelling.

So it’s time we stop asking whether listening “counts.”

No one questions whether a child listening to a bedtime story has experienced that story.

No one says someone who listened to Trevor Noah narrate Born a Crime somehow missed the book because they didn’t turn the pages.

And no one would argue that someone who listened to a podcast didn’t really absorb what they heard because they skipped the transcript.

We instinctively understand that words can be experienced through listening.

So the next time someone says, “Listening isn’t reading,” maybe suggest that they try your favorite audiobook. Because then, instead of debating the medium, they’ll get busy enjoying the story. And that’s always been the point.

Happy listening!