Comment by faeriechangling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by faeriechangling | Hacker News Reader

faeriechangling

People are lying about how much they do read books, and for me, it's not that books are bad but books simply have more competition than they used to.

There are multiple history podcasts, some of which are made by actual historians, which go for hundreds of episodes. It might not be "reading a book" but I really fail to see the big difference between that and an audiobook. Except that it's cheaper/easier/better than using Audiobooks.

I listen to lectures about health from doctors. Casually listening to a lecture simply wasn't something you could just do not so long ago. Is listening to a 2 hour lecture summarising information about a health topic I'm interested in worse than reading books?

I now have access to medical papers which used to be gate-kept by Elsevier with the complicity of higher education. Nowadays it seems like the vast majority of research papers are publicly accessible. Is reading scientific papers worse than reading books?

Maybe I should be paying Audible a subscription fee so that people think I'm erudite though. I don't think there's anything wrong with books but people fetishise them.

> It might not be "reading a book" but I really fail to see the big difference between that and an audiobook.

First, I reject the premise that audiobooks count as reading. We can agree it's consuming a book, or listening to one, but it's pretty objectively not reading.

This is important to my next point too: reading is important not only for expanding ones horizons, but for learning spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and forming long-form arguments. Some of these can be picked up from listening, but certainly not all.

And because we communicate so much by text in the modern world, spelling, grammar, punctuation and sentence structure can have an outsized impact on your life and social interactions

> First, I reject the premise that audiobooks count as reading. We can agree it's consuming a book, or listening to one, but it's pretty objectively not reading.

For (some of) the specific points you're making here, you're right that reading is not the same as listening to an audiobook - you're not learning spelling and punctuation. I don't think that's true of grammar, sentence structure, etc, but ok.

However I push back strongly on the idea that, in general, "audiobooks don't count as reading" in other respects. It's drawing a completely artificial distinction between different modes of consuming information, almost always for the purposes of "gatekeeping" or making one thing seem "less" than the other.

The purpose of reading is mostly to get information and/or a story, "expanding one's horizons" as you put it. This is equally achieved via either physically reading or via listening to someone read the story to you. To the extent that we think reading books is a worthwhile endeavor, 90% of what you get is gotten via audiobooks as much as via physically reading.

> And because we communicate so much by text in the modern world, spelling, grammar, punctuation and sentence structure can have an outsized impact on your life and social interactions

We also communicate a lot by spoken language.

> Is x,y,z worse than reading books? [..] People fetishise them.

If you chose not to read books yes it is worse. There are many books you can read that will give you a massive amount of information about a subject, not only hard facts but soft philosophical issues. I've experienced The Trail by Kafka as radio/play/movie/book, it is amazingly good as a book.

I do not care if you do not think the same or if you can not experience the same thing as I can when I read books. I do not want you to deprive others of that feeling though.

> People are lying about how much they do read books

Whoa nellie.

If a statistic sounds counterintuitive or makes you uncomfortable, just declare it a lie and move on! That seems to be the new standard.

I like podcasts a lot, but I think books can often get more in depth.

A lot of times I'll hear an hour podcast with the author of a book summarizing some parts of it, but when I read the book itself it includes a lot more detail, hard data, etc.

Some podcasts are well researched but many others feel very conversational and not as well fact checked.

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