Reading with Your Ears

Jan 21 2025

By Sarah Zaragoza-Smith, Matthews Library Assistant

I come from a road trip family. I suppose, with five kids to keep track of, my parents worried they’d accidentally create a real-life rendition of Home Alone if we flew. The drawback to road trips, it turns out, is that five kids have a mighty capacity for complaining about boredom when crammed hip-to-hip(-to car seat) in a seven-seater Toyota Highlander for hours at a time.

My mother came up with a brilliant solution: audiobooks. Zooming down highway 5 at 70mph, the bumping of wheels on a pothole-riddled road melted away, replaced by the rock of ocean waves pressing into the hull of the Never Land in Peter and the Starcatchers or the creak of the moving staircases connecting the halls of Hogwarts in Harry Potter. The hours evaporated, and just like magic we’d arrive at our destination without a single instance of name calling, hair pulling, or seat kicking. Long after the car was parked, we would keep one foot in the fictional world as we discussed, debated, and dreamed about the stories we’d heard. Audiobooks brought my whole family together, in spite of the nineteen year difference between my youngest sibling and my oldest.

All of my siblings are readers to this day. In a country where some 28% of adults read fewer than 1 book a year, and the median reads 4, I often wonder if the joy and connection my family fostered around listening to audiobooks are part of the reason we’re all members of the outlier group in these statistics. According to a 2014 study, engagement with audiobooks correlates to increased interest in literary texts, so there might be something to this hunch of mine. Not a bad outcome for my siblings and I considering my mother’s primary aim was simply to find a few hours of peace in the world of chaos she birthed.

To this day, audiobooks play a huge part in the lives of my whole family. When my mother helped move me back across the country after I graduated college we listened to Braiding Sweetgrass and An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, pausing whenever we wanted to discuss these substantial texts. My oldest sister used audiobooks to keep her grounded during the isolating weeks of maternity leave. For my dyslexic youngest sibling, audiobooks are a vital tool for them to access education in a format they can more readily understand. My older sister helps manage her ADHD by listening to audiobooks (sometimes at 3x speed!) while she does the boring tasks that her neurodivergence would usually render near-impossible to start. My brother, an economics professor and father of two, listens to audiobooks when he does his workouts in order to maximize what little leisure time he takes for himself each day.

I have noticed, from some, a subtle apology in their tone when they tell me that they listen to books more frequently than they physically read them. Refrains of “I know it’s cheating but…” preempt many a conversation I’ve had about audiobooks. People trivialize their own reading habits as if they expect me to diminish or discount the hours they’ve spent engaging with audio texts as somehow less valuable because they processed the information first with their ears rather than their eyes. While a debate does exist in the bookish community about whether audiobooks really count as reading, a huge body of research supports the opinion that it should.

First, studies have shown that there is no difference in the amount of information one learns from reading a text compared to listening to it. This research specifically found that, regardless of gender, native English speakers scored comparably on comprehension tests in both the short and the long term, regardless of whether they read, listened to, or simultaneously read and listened to a nonfiction text. The only marked difference came when researchers allowed study participants to review the texts before taking the comprehension quiz. It is, admittedly, easier to skim a written text than it is to scrub through an audio recording. Therefore, if a student is using audiobooks in their studies, they need to take notes as they listen in order to streamline the review process and force their brains to remain in active learning mode. For pleasure reading, though, the difference between print and audio is negligible.

Additionally, the cognitive load is the same for both methods. A University of Virginia psychology professor explains in an opinion article he wrote for the New York Times, “writing is less than 6,000 years old, insufficient time for the evolution of specialized mental processes devoted to reading. We use the mental mechanism that evolved to understand oral language to support the comprehension of written language.” So, for people who refer to their own audiobook habits as “cheating,” please note that your brain is working just as hard as that of a print reader.

Anecdotally, I occasionally catch myself distracted in other tasks while listening to an audiobook and need to rewind the story. I once considered this proof that audiobooks are less reliable for comprehension than physical books. Then I realized that the same thing can happen while reading. Who among us hasn’t gotten to the bottom of a page only to realize that they haven’t retained a single word, and they’ll have to start the page over? Gaining new knowledge and processing narratives both require intentionality, regardless of modality. There is always the danger that listening to a book while multitasking will diminish what you gain from the text. This isn’t the fault of the medium or proof that audiobooks are less valuable than print, but rather a trade-off that you as the listener can choose to pay in order to get more done in a day.

There are benefits of print reading that you cannot get from audiobooks. There is a level of focus and discipline that doing just one thing at a time (physically reading, in this case) brings. You may also find decoding complex texts more straightforward when reading a physical text. It is much easier to chew on a phrase until you’ve extracted all the meaning from it when you can keep re-reading it to your heart’s content. Re-listening is clunkier. Additionally, early readers cannot fully develop their decoding skills through listening alone, so it is particularly important to expose developing and emerging readers to the written word early and often. Audiobooks can augment this process, though. Many reading intervention specialists rely on the reading while listening (RWL) strategy to support new and struggling readers.

From my perspective, it doesn’t matter if an individual places audiobooks in the exact same category as printed texts. A much more valuable consideration is: what benefits do audiobooks provide us? The answer? Tons!

All of those benefits of reading that Jo Melinson outlined in our first blog post still apply when listening to audiobooks. Listening to fiction audiobooks increase empathy by opening our minds to additional perspectives. Listening to any book reduces stress and improves sleep by giving our minds something else to focus on and our eyes a break from our screens. It improves our vocabulary by introducing us to new words, and even teaches us how to correctly pronounce them (something print texts can’t do).

Audiobooks provide us with some benefits that traditional reading simply cannot. Evidence demonstrates that listening to a Shakespearean text helps an audience understand much more than they can from reading it, likely due to the importance of tone and other non-textual cues that we often use when communicating.

Audiobooks are invaluable for exposing us to formal grammatical syntax. When we converse, we are at least somewhat informal, and therefore somewhat grammatically incorrect. When we read, once we’ve developed a fluency for it, our eyes completely skip over the filler words. We even subconsciously skip larger words, simply filling in what we assume fits based on the first letter, context, and relative length of the word. Therefore, the only times in our lives when we experience the full brunt of grammatically correct sentences are when we listen to the written word spoken aloud.

For emerging readers (generally ages 4-7), audiobooks are particularly powerful for demonstrating how one reads with fluency, which is vital for training a child’s inner reading voice. English Language Learners, students with certain disabilities, and other individuals who read at a lower level than is common for their age range can access higher-interest and more-relevant texts. See Spot Run just isn’t going to cut it for a tween, regardless of their English reading level. By listening to an audiobook, such a student can take a break from the arduous process of decoding the messy phonetics of the English language and simply allow the story to wash over them. In this way, audiobooks keep struggling and reluctant readers excited by the idea of reading while introducing them to new vocabulary and ideas to process.

For the rest of us, there’s the mere fact of convenience. There are far too many demands on our time and attention for most of us to read every day, let alone to read for multiple hours at a time. By listening to audiobooks while I do other menial tasks, or just before bed when my eyes are simply too tired to stay open, I am exposed to double the narratives and perspectives compared to what I otherwise could access with print alone.

I think some people discount audiobooks for the same reason I seek to champion them: ease and accessibility. When something feels too good to be true, we’ve been taught to be skeptical of it. What do you mean I can get all of these remarkable benefits associated with reading while I’m folding my laundry, commuting to work, or doing any number of other such tasks associated with the daily drudge of life? There must be a catch. This skepticism is admirable, but ultimately the research on audiobooks demonstrates that they really are that good. Whether or not you believe that listening to audiobooks counts as reading, they benefit their listeners in numerous ways and undeniably augment our lives.

Note: If you are inspired to listen to more audiobooks, you should know that you have access to thousands of them for free! With your local public library card, you can use libby to download audiobooks right to your phone in addition to the audiobook CDs that you can check out from the library itself. With a Country Day library account, you can freely access the hundreds of audiobooks we have for you on sora. Ask a librarian if you need help logging in.