This is an opinion piece. The views are the author’s own.
Mention at a dinner party that you “read” a novel on your commute, admit it was an audiobook, and watch someone’s eyebrow go up. “Oh, so you listened to it.” The tone is the same one people use for “Oh, so you saw the movie.”
It’s time to retire that eyebrow. Listening to a book is reading a book, in every way that matters to most people most of the time. The research backs this up better than the skeptics might expect, and the small exceptions are worth understanding rather than turning into a rule about whose reading counts.
More of us are listening
This isn’t a fringe habit anymore. In a Pew Research Center survey of 8,046 U.S. adults conducted in October 2025, 26% said they had listened to an audiobook in the past year. In 2011, that figure was 11%. Over the same stretch, the share who read a print book fell from 72% to 64%, while e-books rose from 17% to 31%.
Print is still the most popular format by a wide margin. But a quarter of American adults is a lot of people to quietly exclude from the category of “readers.” Overall, Pew found that 75% of adults had read at least part of a book in any format in the past year. Many of the people pushing that number up are doing it with earbuds in.
What the research actually says
The strongest version of the skeptic’s argument is that you simply don’t take in as much when you listen. That’s a testable claim, and it has been tested many times.
In 2022, education researcher Virginia Clinton-Lisell published a meta-analysis in the journal Review of Educational Research that pulled together 46 studies with 4,687 participants comparing reading and listening comprehension. The headline result: overall, the difference between the two was not reliably different from zero. People understood about as much from listening as from reading.
That’s not the end of the story, and I don’t want to pretend it is. The same analysis found some real nuances:
- Pacing matters. When readers could set their own pace, reading had a modest edge over listening.
- The type of understanding matters. Reading did better on questions that required drawing inferences and on general comprehension. On literal recall, the facts on the page, there was essentially no difference.
- Accessibility matters. The paper’s own conclusion was that both audio and written options are needed for accessible instruction. Neither format wins everywhere.
Look at what that adds up to. The advantage for print shows up mostly when you can slow down, go back and puzzle over a hard passage. That’s a real benefit, and anyone who has tried to follow a dense argument while merging onto a highway knows it. But it’s an argument for choosing the right format for the job, not for declaring one format fake.
Reading was never only about eyes
Part of the snobbery comes from treating reading as a single physical act: eyes moving across a page. But what we usually value about reading isn’t the eye movement. It’s what happens in your head. You follow a plot, meet characters, absorb an argument, imagine a place you’ve never been and come out a little changed.
Stories were told aloud long before they were written down, and plenty of people grew up being read to before they could read themselves. Nobody tells a seven-year-old that the bedtime story didn’t count because a parent’s voice did the work. A good narrator is doing much the same thing for adults, with better production values.
And for some readers, the ear is simply the better door. People with visual impairments, people who find print hard going, and people whose days leave no room to sit still with a book can all reach the same stories through audio. That’s the accessibility point the meta-analysis was making, and it should carry more weight in this debate than a vague sense that listening is too easy.
The fair objections
I’ll concede some ground, because the case for audiobooks doesn’t need to be overstated.
Attention is the weak point. If you’re listening while doing something that demands your focus, you will miss things. That isn’t a flaw of audio so much as a flaw of multitasking, but audio makes multitasking very tempting. Folding laundry and listening works well. Answering emails and listening mostly doesn’t.
Some books are better on paper. A thick history with maps, a cookbook, a poetry collection where line breaks matter, or a technical book you’ll want to flip back through: these often work better in print or as an e-book. The research on self-paced reading supports this. When you need to stop, reread and think, a page gives you more control than a play button.
Kids learning to read need print. Listening builds vocabulary and a love of stories, but children still have to learn to decode words on a page. Audiobooks are a supplement there, not a substitute. That’s a point about learning a skill, though, not about whether an adult who listens to a novel has “really” read it.
None of these objections leads to the conclusion that audiobooks don’t count. They lead to a much more sensible one: use the format that suits the book and the moment.
Why the gatekeeping is counterproductive
There’s a practical cost to the eyebrow, too. Plenty of adults say they’d like to read more and don’t have the time. Audio turns dead time into reading time: the commute, the dog walk, the dishes. If we tell those people that this doesn’t count, we aren’t protecting literature. We’re discouraging the exact habit we claim to admire.
Looking down on a format is a habit worth questioning in general. The question worth asking about any book is whether it was worth your time and what you took from it, not which sense delivered the words.
How to listen like a reader
If you want audio to give you as much as a page does, a few habits help. Slow the playback down rather than speeding it up when a book gets dense; the meta-analysis suggests control over pace is where print gets its edge, so take some of that control back. Use the bookmark or clip feature when a line lands, the way you’d underline it on paper. Rewind without guilt when your mind wanders. And if a book clearly needs a page, buy or borrow the print copy and switch. Many people do both, listening in the car and reading the same book at night.
So, does it count?
Yes. If you listened to a book with your attention on it, you read it. Put it on your list, talk about it at book club and argue about the ending.
Just be honest with yourself about how you listen. Save the dense, chewy books for times when you can give them full attention, or pick them up in print. Let the audio version carry the novels, memoirs and long reads that fit into the corners of your day. And the next time someone raises an eyebrow, ask them what they thought of the book. That’s the conversation worth having.
More on Contoh
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- Take the Photo. Then Put the Phone Away.
- Stop Letting the Feed Pick Your News
Sources
- Pew Research Center: Americans still opt for print books over digital or audio versions
- ERIC: Clinton-Lisell, “Listening Ears or Reading Eyes: A Meta-Analysis of Reading and Listening Comprehension Comparisons,” Review of Educational Research (2022)
- Review of Educational Research: Listening Ears or Reading Eyes (journal page)