Podcasts and audiobooks have benefited from the same trends in technology. Before smartphones, Bluetooth earbuds or over-the-ear fashion-statement headphones and streaming audio / podcast services, podcasts and audiobooks were largely consigned to the commute in the car or to distract the mind when your body is running or working out.
Even with those technological constraints, audiobooks have been the classic overachiever in the book industry.
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According to data from the Audio Publishers Association’s latest survey, U.S. publishers reported audiobook sales in 2018 that totaled $940 million, a revenue figure that has grown 24.5 percent year-over-year since 2017. Unit sales are up even more, rising 27.3 percent over 2017.
In fact, the audiobook industry has seen double-digit growth for the last seven years. To further illustrate how digital downloads and streaming accelerate that growth, 91.4 percent of 2018's $940 million in U.S. audiobook revenue came entirely from digital formats.
With the print – and even ebook – industries essentially posting flat sales or tortoise-speed growth, we must ask ourselves: How does listening to an audiobook compare to reading a print or electronic-format book?
Better comprehension?
More or less immersive experience?
Stimulate creativity?
More emotional response?
Is an audiobook cheating
Is listening to a book really the same as reading one?
“I was a fan of audiobooks, but I always viewed them as cheating,” says Beth Rogowsky, an associate professor of education at the Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.
For a 2016 study, Rogowsky tested the difference between listening and reading. One group in her study listened to sections of Unbroken, a nonfiction book about World War II by Laura Hillenbrand, while a second group read the same parts on an e-reader. She included a third group that both read and listened at the same time. Afterward, everyone took a quiz designed to measure how well they had absorbed the material. “We found no significant differences in comprehension between reading, listening, or reading and listening simultaneously,” Rogowsky reports in the study.
However, Rogowsky’s study used e-readers rather than traditional print books, and there’s some evidence that reading on a screen reduces learning and comprehension compared to reading from printed text. So it’s possible that, had her study pitted traditional books against audiobooks, old-school reading might have come out on top.
A New York Times op-ed by Daniel Willingham addressed the question of whether listening to a book is the same as reading it. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, is a leading researcher of reading comprehension. He begins the piece with the same question that intrigued Rogowsky from the University of Pennsylvania: “Is listening to an audiobook cheating?”
Willingham’s op-ed favors balance over bombast pointing out several benefits of reading and listening, but he is careful to note that doesn’t mean listening and reading are equivalent.
“The critical difference between reading and listening is that reading is something you do, “notes Utah psychologist Susan Ransom, “where listening is something that happens to you. Reading is an act of engagement. Audiobooks, on the other hand, make progress with or without your conscious participation.
“You can tune out the audiobook and the listening experience still continues,” Ransom concludes.
“About 10 to 15 percent of eye movements during reading are actually regressive—meaning the eyes are going back and re-checking,” Willingham explains in his op-ed. “This happens very quickly, and it’s sort of seamlessly stitched into the process of reading a sentence.” He says this reading quirk almost certainly bolsters comprehension, and it may be roughly comparable to a listener asking for a speaker to “hold on” or repeat something.
Improving comprehension and vocabulary
Hearing new words can significantly help with comprehension and vocabulary, especially for children and second-language learners. Just as early elementary school classes encourage new readers to say words aloud, audiobooks promote the same healthy learning habits. Mary Beth Crosby Carroll from The Children's School in Brooklyn, NY, told Scholastic that “following along visually while listening can enhance word-recognition ability while listening alone can expand vocabulary.” Audiobooks provide unique context clues and intonations that can help readers better understand the meaning and application of specific words.
Listening can help our brains better imagine the story
The vivid images and jump-off-the-page characters in books create a sort of magic, regardless of format. But a study conducted by the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior found that our brains are actually more likely to create meaningful imagery when we listen to a story — compared to when it’s read in a traditional format — because it allows more space for our brain’s visual processes to kick into gear. This explains, in part, why so many younger children love when someone reads to them.
The re-reading and underlining advantage
Another consideration is that when we’re reading or listening to a text, our minds occasionally wander. Seconds (or minutes) can pass before we snap out of these little mental sojourns and refocus our attention, says David Daniel, a professor of psychology at James Madison University and a member of a National Academy of Sciences project aimed at understanding how people learn.
“If you’re reading, it’s pretty easy to go back and find the point at which you zoned out. It’s not so easy if you’re listening to a recording,” Daniel notes.
Especially if you’re grappling with a complicated text, the ability to quickly backtrack and re-examine the material may aid learning, and this is likely easier to do while reading than while listening.
“Turning the page of a book also gives you a slight break,” Daniel says. “This brief pause may create space for your brain to store or savor the information you’re absorbing.”
Daniel co-authored a 2010 study that found students who listened to a podcast lesson performed worse on a comprehension quiz than students who read the same lesson on paper. “And the podcast group did a lot worse, not a little worse,” he says. Compared to the readers, the listeners scored an average of 28% lower on the quiz—about the difference between an A or a D grade, he says.
He says it’s possible that, with practice, the listeners might be able to make up ground on the readers. “We get good at what we do, and you could become a better listener if you trained yourself to listen more critically,” he says. (The same could be true of screen-based reading; some research suggests that people who practice “screen learning” get better at it.)
But there may also be some “structural hurdles” that impede learning from audio material, Daniels says. For one thing, you can’t underline or highlight something you hear. And many of the “This is important!” cues that show up in textbooks—things like bolded words or boxed bits of critical info—aren’t easily emphasized in audio-based media.
Listening can help us attach deeper meaning to phrases.
When you’re reading a book, a lot of focus is placed on filling in gaps: voices, sounds, settings, accents, and more. These are all details your mind needs to create a full picture. Dr. Art Markman from The University of Texas tested whether hearing a proverb versus reading it resulted in a difference in comprehension. The results showed that when we hear a statement like "the squeaky wheel gets the grease," we’re more likely to connect this to other proverbs that have similar deep meanings.
But when we read that same proverb, our brain will pick out the literal elements rather than those that contribute to its deeper meaning, making us more likely to associate that proverb with others that mention wheels. According to Markman, because we can't go back and “reread” audiobooks as easily, we’re inadvertently forcing our brains to extract deeper meanings more quickly. In other words, listening to audiobooks enables the mind to comprehend phrases at a faster speed.
Listening can spark a more emotional reaction
According to a study from University College London, people have a more emotional reaction when listening to a novel than they do when watching an adaptation. When we listen to a story, our brain has to create more content, such as imagery, to supplant the words. This helps create a “greater emotional and physiological engagement than watching the scene on a screen, as measured by both heart rate and electro-dermal activity,” according to conclusions drawn by Dr. Joseph Levin. The science makes intuitive sense ‒ hearing a story read aloud emulates social tendencies and humans are conditioned to communicate with each other orally.
When readers struggle
Young children, people with dyslexia and those who are visually impaired may find that they can retain more of the story when listening to audiobooks than when reading the written word. Matt Davis from the University of Cambridge explains: “Anyone who finds reading difficult might retain more from listening to an audiobook. The additional effort involved in reading the words uses mental resources that they would otherwise need for comprehension and memory.”
The oral tradition
Humans have been sharing information orally for tens of thousands of years, Willingham says, while the printed word is a much more recent invention.
“When we’re reading, we’re using parts of the brain that evolved for other purposes, and we’re MacGyvering them so they can be applied to the cognitive task of reading,” he explains. Listeners, on the other hand, can derive a lot of information from a speaker’s inflections or intonations. Sarcasm is much more easily communicated via audio than printed text. And people who hear Shakespeare spoken out loud tend to glean a lot of meaning from the actor’s delivery, he adds.
Two things at once
A final factor may tip the comprehension and retention scales firmly in favor of reading, and that’s the issue of multitasking.
A multitude of studies reveals that multitasking is more fiction than fact. In essence, humans don’t do it very well, if at all. So listening to an audiobook while driving to work, cutting the lawn and walking to the local coffee shop could mean limited comprehension, retention and brain engagement.
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So after 1,500 words, what have we learned? Reading can offer benefits because we are more exclusively engaged in that activity and can re-read, take notes and review printed material easily. Listening does offer us the ability to enjoy an immersive experience with all the nuances of the spoken word and its emotional resonance can help those with reading issues and can actually aid in comprehension and vocabulary.
So consider this article the journalistic version of a 0-0 tie in a soccer game. Lots of great attacking movements with several shots on goal over 90 minutes.
For soccer (football) fans, there will be no penalty kicks to decide about the dominance of listening or reading.
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