Audiobooks Are Books and They're Also Practice

Audiobook is not reading. I'd be curious about the rate of learning new words for someone that reads a book versus someone that listens to it.

I think the act of reading is much more mentally involved than the one of listening, after all, we can only really read when we are 4 to 5 years old at least. Meaning it is a more complicated cognitive task and so the brain engages the activity differently. Which probably leads to different results.

I mean, audiobooks will generally add tone and whatnot to dialogues too. It is a less imaginative task for the listener.

Obviously, none of this is to say that audiobooks aren't great. But it's just not reading.

Personally I am listening to "the expanse" series of novels and I do this while I just go out and walk. The audiobook is a great motivator for me to go out and do things as this is the only time I listen. I might start to incorporate it into exercise routine and house chores, to make these more pleasant experiences. But obviously this at the same time implies that my attention is going to be divided. And that's okay. That's kind of how I treat audiobooks.

> If you have tried listening to audiobooks before but find it’s hard to pay attention [...]

What works for me is setting a timer to pause playback every ten minutes. If I'm actively paying attention I can unpause it again by pressing the play/pause button on my headphones. But if it pauses and I don't notice it, or if I realize I don't really know what was said in the past 10 minutes, then I can rewind 10 minutes and resume from that point later.

Nope. Wrong.

Audiobooks are great. I love them. Do you get the content of the story the same as reading? Absolutely. Should anyone gatekeep or look down on people that get their “book content” via audio? Absolutely not.

That said, they are 100% **not** reading. You can’t teach a child to read by giving them audio book. End of story (unless you can’t read, I suppose).

I consider audiobooks and visual novels, both as books. They're books with an implementation layer applied on top (narration, artwork, music). My views are still mixed up.

Most often I've noticed people in discussion about audiobooks will also talk about the narrator's performance, or the VN's artwork/music. And those have a very strong influence on what they thought of the book. This is the bit that does not sit well with me, as it takes away from individual aspects of reading. It also means that a poor implementation can lead someone to hold a book in a negative light.

I'm not necessarily on board with the author regarding practice; it's a good sentiment to learn something new while reading, and also how it ties in with our own (lack of) interpersonal skills. But not everything needs to be about productivity or skills, especially if a leisure activity is used as a means of escape.

> If you have tried listening to audiobooks before but find it’s hard to pay attention, I recommend you start only with re-reading. It is hard to convince people of this but I am sure it’s true: Re-reading is often much more rewarding than reading for the first time.

I do this with long series, like Master & Commander or A Song of Ice and Fire, but for the opposite reason: so that I don't have to listen closely. I listen while I'm doing other things that take a variable amount of concentration. I know those books so well that there is little lost when I miss a random passage. But it's still comforting background noise.

The re-listening is often more rewarding, I agree. I look forward to the especially good bits and learn more and more of their foreshadowing.

I would like to listen to audiobooks at work, but often there's too much background noise to hear it properly (while not wearing headphones); it makes me wonder if there are audio player apps that will pause and rewind when the mic detects db over a certain threshold.

Best way to keep your attention on an audiobook is to simultaneously play a game that offers repetitive tasks and requires no cognitive effort. For instance, mine/build stuff with Minecraft or clean objects with PowerWash Simulator. If the game has any plot or requires any reading or figuring something out, then you quickly lose focus on the book. But quite many games have "grinding" that you can do for a long time for this purpose.

To the list of favorite audiobooks, I'd add:

A Short History of Nearly Everything

This was not rereading for me. I still haven't "read" the book, but I don't need to.

The Sun Also Rises: this one I'd read. Maybe a book written in the first person is easier to narrate?