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cosmolinguist) wrote2025-03-06 10:40 pm
What is reading?
The survey also found that most Britons (53%) don’t consider listening to an audiobook to be equivalent to having read that same book. Just 29% said that they think of listening to audiobooks to be the same as reading...
Okay.
I don't think it's a very well-worded question.
I don't think audiobooks are "the same" because I prefer to read some kinds of books as audio and others as ebooks.
I think a good narrator can add a lot to a book. (I can't imagine the Murderbot series without Kevin R. Free's amazing narration.
I also love Scott Brick as an audiobook reader, he's a big reason that a book about salt has become a comfort re-read for me.I can't imagine the Murderbot series without Kevin R. Free's amazing narration. I also love Scott Brick as an audiobook reader, he's a big reason that a book about salt has become a comfort re-read for me. Both Nigel Planer and Stephen Briggs make Terry Pratchett books better.)
But I don't think that's what people mean here.
I think at least some of those people are saying that audiobooks aren't as good as reading. They're not "real" reading.
And I think that because people regularly say that audiobooks "don't count."
Some of this is the same kind of snobbishness that doesn't even "count" ebooks as "real."
But some of it is specifically ableism.
The article keeps referring to books "read or listened to." The implication is that these aren't the same. Listening isn't reading.
I actually wonder what would happen if braille was explicitly included. Like we don't say that braille users touched a book, we still say they read it.
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We do. <3
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I really like physical books - but I am incredibly heavy handed with them particularly my more academic ones. I am highlighting and making comments in the margins (sometimes even in pen!). I dog ear the page and a lot of my more read paperbacks have broken spines. SEveral have been dropped in the bath because they're there to be loved. E-books and audionbooks are amazing for commuting and when you're not in one place for long or living in a bedsit with limited space. How great is it to have some read to you while you're busy washing up or walking in the sun? Plus with my dyslexia, some books are easier beingheard.
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Having access to physical books and places for them is such a good point. My reading was so limited when I was a kid in ways it wouldn't have been if I could digitally borrow audiobooks and e-books at a second's notice, 24/7, like I can now.
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Some of it is having emotional attachment to them (like poetry books by people who I knew as my dad's mates but known to a niche market or books that I want to get round to reading because they're politically important)
But wider access is fucking amazing. I just finished an audiobook which would have taken me months to read in print because of the names
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I'm pro VI kids being given good access to Braille as one of many tools they might want to use alongside audio and whatever else... Cos in the Real World most folk I know mix n match to a greater or lesser degree and audio has enabled some people (blind or not) to read a book for the first time when they otherwise could not (for whatever reason) or enabled others to enjoy a different modality even if they also read in text or Braille like my mum.
The ableism and snobbery can get in the fucking bin. The newer text-to-speech voices/options which can be trained using "AI" on any voice you like are amazing and I'm seeing students accessing stuff this way that they never could/would before. A dear friend is listening to tedious land law in Barack Obama's voice (trained off a video of him speaking) which she finds soothing AND interesting enough to focus on, fair play to her.
People are hella snobbish about reading on so many levels, I hate it. Some folk like reading (in whatever modalities), others don't. Some folk like playing sports, others don't.
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A dear friend is listening to tedious land law in Barack Obama's voice (trained off a video of him speaking) which she finds soothing AND interesting enough to focus on
That is fascinating! I never thought of such uses but that's fabulous and I'm glad it's helping people.
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I would never have thought of it either, but I find in talking to disabled folk non judgementally and with interest about 'what they do' I pick up all sorts of brilliant self-empowering ideas, which I can then suggest to others or get others to give themselves permission to try random shit.
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For example, if I understand snd remember correctly, the great Temple Grandin literally thinks in pictures.
I am no Temple Grandin, but I feel like my brain seems to store things in its equivalent of audio files. This has appeared to help me learn languages and music, because words and phrases fromthe languages I was learning or songs I would hear would constantly rattle around in my brain and I seemed to be able to learn them faster. (It was also bad in that while my chronic sleep deprivation sometimes makes it hard to remember more recent things like what I did last weekend, I seem to also be prone to remembering catchy jingles and stupid ad campaigns that I despise)
I first got a conscious idea of this when my partner and I were taking Welsh on duolingo and I was getting frustrated, feeling like such an idiot for repeatedly missing words I had just had, but was just not remembering. My partner had observed me better than I had observed myself, noting that when I physically heard the words I seemed to pick them up as quickly as I expected to, for the most part. He suggested that I use the app’s sound, and to say the words myself for the ones without sound, and darned if that did not exactly seem to correlate.
Also had to chime in because I adore Kevin R. Free reading the Murderbot books and Stephen Briggs reading the Discworld books — I cannot fathom why he isn’t a huge audiobook star, he is so brilliant. I tried to find his version if Good Omens on cd for years and finally had to settle for an mp3 disc. I also love Scott Brick; I think I may have heard him primarily kn the Vorkosigan books, although he has a huge number of titles and I probably have him on other thinfs, as well (Haha, the Vorkosigan books are among the few whose intro music I actually like, rather than gritting my teeth through).
Have you heard Adjoa Andoh? I love her narrating Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch books.
Also, I find Richard Mitchley reading Susan Cooper’s “The Grey King” (Y Brenin Llwyd!) to be very engaging and warm, with a beautiful Welsh accent for the Welsh characters. There is a section where a Welsh friend is explaining some pronunciation of Welsh to an English friend, and it is one of my favourite book passages ever (made even better by Mitchley’s warmth snd gift for language).
Sorry for the apparent novel! I am not very concise sometimes.
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when I physically heard the words I seemed to pick them up as quickly as I expected to, for the most part. He suggested that I use the app’s sound, and to say the words myself for the ones without sound...
That's such an astute observation! And linguistically it makes sense; we all learn to speak and to read at different times as babies/children, really it'd be weirder if we all learned to hear and read language with exactly the same ease.
Stephen Briggs reading the Discworld books
This came up when I made similar points on Mastodon -- shout out to Stephen Briggs! I am so spoiled by his (and, for some early ones, Nigel Planer's) voice that even if I read the books now I'm as likely as not to hear the voices I associate with the audiobook.
I honestly don't think I could have gotten through Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch books if not for the lovely narration. :) I feel bad that I didn't like those books as much as many of my friends have, I thought they were fine -- I didn't dislike them, I kept reading them as the library got them, but I definitely would've given up with the first one if the audiobooks hadn't been such compelling performances!
Sorry for the apparent novel! I am not very concise sometimes.
Nothing to be sorry for! I'm delighted to hear all your thoughts!
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I'm sure that has an impact on different reading capacities in humans.
I'd also argue until maybe even the 1970s or 1990s it was possible to live life without reading all that much and still be functional and successful. We read more than we did 50/100/200 years ago on average.
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your example is interesting - i'm currently using Murderbot as my go-to-sleep audiobook and the narrator is indeed excellent - BUT i read them in book form first so it took me a long time to be willing to listen to it at all because Murderbot doesn't have a gender and the narrator voice sounds male to me
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Enting isn't reading much yet (in part due to what may be a learning difference), but he's learned so much from listening to audiobooks, my reading books aloud to him, and other sources like podcasts. If I'd held those back from him because it "didn't count" unless he read the words off the page himself, he'd be so much poorer for it.
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This is a really good perspective, thank you for sharing it. <3
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from people who don't fully understand that the performance of stories and culture is much older than anybody's writing system
Yeah I think this was well and truly gone from me when I started a linguistics degree, which basically disregards written language almost entirely because spoken (or signed) language is so much more fundamental. I, among other things, learned a lot more about oral cultures and the prejudice that colonialists have given to colonized people.