Actually, I'm somewhere in between about Audio books.

First of all, for some books, that's great. Esp, if read by a good voice actor. It can convert a book to radio theater, that's magic.

However, if you're listening while you're driving, or being distracted, you lose the some parts of the picture.

Lastly, not all books are good audio books. Some of them need stopping, reflecting, and some re-reading sometimes.

So, horses for courses I may say.

I tend to rewind audio books and re listen to the last minute or two or three.

Ten years ago I read James Joyce’s Ulysses as a book. I enjoyed it, but when I listened to it as an audio book a year later, the excellent actors/voice artists really brought it to life for me.

I often self describe myself as a ‘gentleman scientist’ because for many years I have done my own research, sometimes in areas where I had no interest in practical application. I also believe that the act of writing is crucial to thinking (I have written 20+ books, 2500+ blog articles). I think too many people put too much emphasis on “work” vs. just living: averaging only ‘working’ about 60% of my adult life has made room for other activitites.

I cannot say what works for other people. For me, unless I’m reading with my eyeballs, taking notes, and working examples, I’m not really convinced I’m learning anything difficult.

The snob's take is bad, but there is a point of agreement I have with one aspect of audiobooks: it's impossible to remember details about things that fall outside your native language, if you haven't already studied them. For example, I listened to a nonfiction audiobook about Xi Jinping. I could tell you the broad strokes of the people in his orbit from the late 1970s on, but I have no idea how to spell or even Google them effectively, because I never read them--I only heard them.

The same goes for foreign concepts/places/etc., for me at least there is no substitute for reading when it comes to retention and recall of material.

I saw elsewhere that someone said it was ablist to say that an audiobook doesn't count as a book, which I could only think that we put too much importance on books.

Don't take this as an anti-intellectual screed. Far from it--I read a lot. But I think you can also learn from magazines, newspapers, plays, orations, etc. It leads to this weird situation where people are optimizing not for what they're learning but for the count. How many books have you read this year? Does an audiobook count? Like... it doesn't really matter.

I could argue that it doesn't because you use different neural path ways to absorb the book :)

I used to agree with you, but then I found out how most people get through audiobooks and TV shows. They just miss stuff! They zone out for a few seconds or a few minutes. They take phone calls and move the laundry into the dryer without pausing and rewinding. It's crazy! Watching a fast-moving TV show with someone like that is bizarre because they'll happily sit through a complex conversation between characters even though they missed all the context that makes the conversation make sense.

Granted you can miss a lot when you're reading, too, since a lot of the context for any work is external to the work itself, but with a book, you have to actively choose to keep going when you're confused, rather than passively letting it flow past you. Nothing privileges the choice to turn to the next page rather than returning to the previous page.

I think the experience of reading books at least is good training for how to read an audiobook or listen to a lecture. You should be quick to pause and rewind if you suspect you missed something.

To be pedantic, it’s definitionally not reading. You listened to the book, you didn’t read it.

There’s just an odd legitimacy associated specifically with reading - that people want to access, and so makes other people weirdly snobbish/defensive of it.