Why YSK: if you don’t have the ability or time to devote your visual attention to reading, you can still engage your mind the same way as you do while reading by listening to an audiobook. Virtually any modern audiobook player will also let you select the play speed, so you can listen to books at whatever rate you’re comfortable with.
Personally I know as I’ve gotten older the number of hours I’m physically able to read tends to no longer be able to match my desire to read, so it’s nice to be able to keep going even if my eyes are sore.
Historically, this is somewhat analogous to the late 19th century lectors that worked in some factories, paid by donated workers’ wages, to read/perform popular books for bored workers. Predictably in the US factory owners tended to have a problem with their workers listening to ‘communist literature,’ leading to firings, strikes, and violent crackdowns.
That last part about factory workers was an absolute gem of a YSK.
I will say that reading lets me comprehend way more but I have too sensitive eyes to do it for 30 minutes and audio is EXTREMELY close once I setup the speed and all as I like.
According to this page, that is just not true.
When you read, your brain is working hard behind the scenes. It recognizes the shapes of letters, matches them to speech sounds, connects those sounds to meaning, then links those meanings across words, sentences and even whole books. The text uses visual structure such as punctuation marks, paragraph breaks or bolded words to guide understanding. You can go at your own speed.
Listening, on the other hand, requires your brain to work at the pace of the speaker. Because spoken language is fleeting, listeners must rely on cognitive processes, including memory to hold onto what they just heard.
Also reading really activates my fantasy while listening does not, at least not to the same extent
While that might be the case, audio books bore me to death. Because I read way, way faster than anyone can talk.
Play it on 2, 3, 4x speed. However fast you can still understand.
I still read way faster. As in “hundreds of pages per hour”. Audio can’t compete.
audiobooks and reading books both activate the same language related areas of the brain
This doesn’t mean they’re the same thing. This is an area of ongoing research (because audiobooks have only recently become very popular) so there are surprisingly few studies on the topic, but the general consensus is that they’re not the same thing. For example, while reading you go at your own pace and can easily re-read or skim words or sentences, but you can’t do this when listening to audiobooks.
I’d link you to a nice essay I read(!) on this last year in a Finnish newspaper, but it’s in Finnish so most users here probably won’t get much out of it… Actually what the hell, I’ll link it anyway: https://www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/art-2000011260022.html
Pure anecdote, but my personal experience suggests that reading vs listening do not activate the same part of the brain. With textbooks specifically, reading assignments never seemed to do me much good - I’d read a page, really giving it my attention, but then make it to the end of the page and realize I have no idea what it was talking about like 3 paragraphs ago.
Enter the age of digital textbooks and text-to-speech software - fucking godsend for me, even when it’s the shitty Microsoft Sam style voice. Listening to the material instead of reading increased retention quite a bit.
Taking it up another notch, doing them both simultaneously was the clear winner. If I listen to a reading assignment while following along visually reading the text, it’s like a one-and-done and ready to take the test at the end of the semester with no further studying.
I discovered this superpower near the end of highschool, and it has absolutely carried me through everything since - if you think you might be an auditory learner, give it a shot!
It is very much about finding what works for each individual. It is understood different students learn best different ways.
I got a bunch of audio books and ebooks from HumbleBundle. I consumed the audio books first, and am going through the ebooks slower. Audio books were wonderful when driving or doing yard or house work. I would sometime have to rewind and repeat.
Ebooks required my focus so I haven’t found myself consuming them nearly as quickly.
Taking it up another notch, doing them both simultaneously was the clear winner. If I listen to a reading assignment while following along visually reading the text, it’s like a one-and-done and ready to take the test at the end of the semester with no further studying.
I believe there’s some research that confirms your anecdote in that kids with reading comprehension difficulties had a much easier time reading when they were both reading and listening to the text at the same time. Entirely possible it’s applicable to the general population too (or maybe you just have undiagnosed dyslexia or something).
Well I assume it isn’t as beneficial for your spelling abilities
But better for your pronunciation of new words.
no thanks, I like saying words wrong for a decade until finding out one day that the big smart word that made me sound like a big smart boy is actually stressed on the other syllable
“Elite” threw me for a long time.
You’re*
I really like audiobooks because it means that I can read while driving, or while doing dishes, or in the shower.
Yeah, I go through about 40ish books a year because I can listen while driving. I actually like it better because I can ask my car for a word definition or check a date or whatever.
Audiobooks helped me go from 0 books read in 2024 to 72 books in 2025.
Yup. Almost 0 in 2024, to over 50 in 2025. Spun up my AudioBookShelf instance in May, so that number will likely be a lot higher in 2026. Just from listening while doing chores or driving to/from work.
I have found the best of both worlds. I can read along while I listen. https://storyteller-platform.gitlab.io/storyteller/
IIRC there’s a scene in Die Another Day (2002) where James bond visits a Cuban cigar factory and there’s a lector.
Cuban cigar factories still are employing lectors.
This is so fascinating that the factory lector was/is a thing
The practice of reading aloud has a long history, and the tradition still survives in Cuba as a hard-won right deeply embedded in cigar factory workers’ culture. (El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader – paywall)
This article has some intriguing historical photos, really worth a look:
The article is on JSTOR. If you are reading this comment and you live or work in Massachusetts you can get free JSTOR access. With more work (you have to go to a library) you can get free access if you live in New York State. If you live somewhere else, pick a library you know near you. You never know, sometimes even more municipal networks have access.
He is reading the daily news paper right?
I recall a story about when the war factories in WW2 started playing the radio through the assembly line productivity increased.
Audio books aren’t my cup of tea but I’m extremely glad they’re picking up in popularity for those that enjoy them. Stay literate everyone!
Yes as it turns out both text and audiobooks contain this “language” thing.
Movies also have this “language” thing. It distinguishes audio books as much closer to reading than a movie is, despite all 3 conveying the same content.
Movies still do it too just much less because they’re engineered to be easy to watch.
There were a lot of babies in there Carl
This is interesting and I’m glad to see this. I’ve always been an avid reader and until recently, I could read words on a page for hours on end but really could not sustain my attention to an audiobook for more than a few minutes, and always felt like my retention was very poor when I tried listening to books. But that was always a me thing.
My brother and wife have both been avid audiobook readers for a number of years and I always picked up on them feeling mildly insecure about it, as if they weren’t “really” reading when it was an audiobook.
Oddest of all, in the past year or so, my brain has completely flipped and now I mainly read via audiobook and text on a page can’t hold my attention for long.
deleted by creator
Others have said it, but definitely speed them up. I used to have the same complaint, but now I keep it at 1.25x and adjust from there.
Speed them up.
Depending on the book, I usually read at 1.4x or up to 2x if I’ve already read it.
I run all of my audiobooks at 1.25x speed as a bare minimum. If a narrator is particularly slow, sometimes I’ll even bump it up as high as 2x. Any half-decent audiobook player will have built-in speed controls.
For instance, if you’re running AudioBookShelf for self-hosting your audiobooks, Plappa (an unofficial but very well done listening app that syncs to your server) has it right there on the bottom:
On my particular color scheme it is purple, but you can change that in the settings. You can also set things like auto-pause (after {x} time, at the end of the chapter, or at the end of the next chapter), and bookmarks (which you can label) to come back to later.
