I've been listening to Postman 😅 and wondering about this. The net effect of quitting audio books would be that I consume far less written information. I don't engage deeply with everything I listen to, but not all of it is worth deep engagement.
Then again, when listening to The Prince, do I really want to embark on a deep dive into Renaissance geopolitics, or is it enough to skim across the surface in an effort to sample a classic while providing fodder for lateral thinking?
I spent the first 20 years of my life with no TV and developed a typographic mind. I also was clueless about how to communicate with my peers, and very narrowly informed. Still figuring out the best mix....
I think listening is fine for “light” stuff (however defined) but for serious fiction I prefer to read. I only read fiction these days except for Substacks like this one or technical docs related to work.
I’m a music professor and I have to remind my students, over and over, about the difference between hearing and listening. It’s so easy to turn listening—a foreground activity—into hearing—a background activity—that we often don’t notice the change has happened. We’re biologically wired to “think less” with our ears than with other senses.
How often is someone who is “listening” to an audio book really only “hearing” it?
But, to the larger point, I am always saddened by how much we are all encouraged to eschew any/all friction. To me, the whole point of any intellectual activity (and most physical ones for that matter) is the slog. Working through something difficult *is* the point, not the “I finished” part.
To quote an album title from 1987: “Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death.”
I appreciate this distinction you made, which I didn’t and should have. I treated hearing and listening as the same but you’re correct that they’re distinct. And the thing about audiobooks is the ease with which it can become background noise.
Yes. It’s the ease with which we slip between listening (actively) and hearing (passively) that I am always trying to point out. I catch myself, **constantly**, slipping into semi-ignoring what I am “hearing,” which then means it’s little more than background noise. You can’t really read as a background activity. Reading **must** be the foreground activity, making it a different thing than listening/hearing.
I think I am ok with folks insisting that listening *can* be “useful” and/or “effective,” but it’s silly to insist it’s “the same” as reading.
Honestly, I've had that same experience when reading. My mind wanders while my eyes keep moving along the text, even registering the individual words. Maybe it's just me.
I enjoy non-fiction as audio, but have a much harder time with fiction. I can no longer imagine distinct voices when constantly hearing the voice of the reader. I lose track of the setting easily as well.
Seems like hearing an author read passages from their novel at bookstore would have a similar effect. I've never done that so I wouldn't know. 🤔
Thanks for the reply. I used to read all the time but due to my age and years of screen time that is required by my job, I've found that audiobooks give my eyes time to rest. I usually do not multitask while listening. It's possible that there are circumstances that make either option more or less appropriate for any individual. Maybe I'll pick up some fiction and give it a go.
Thank you for this distinction. It’s very helpful to me.
A few years ago, I made an effort to listen to audiobooks, but had very little success retaining anything. I kept pausing the recording to consider the idea, scene, or description, which annoyed me even though that is what I do when reading a book. It felt like I was wasting my time.
I couldn’t understand how my friends listened to so many books (fiction and nonfiction). Finally, after asking every audiobook fan I knew for their routines and experiences, I finally understood that my friends were satisfied with a more distracted or multitasked experience than I was. (What you have defined as hearing vs listening.) Once I understood that our expectations were different, I stopped trying to force myself to use audiobooks except as an aid to reading.
I look forward to your writing because you write with clarity and conviction, and you don't shy away from expressing views that will challenge mainstream ideas. This one got me thinking about my own practices, and why I've never been interested in audiobooks.
Consumption of information is overrated because knowing more stuff doesn't translate into increased intelligence in navigating life or character development. I'm more likely to contemplate how to implement something I read that stuck with me than anything I heard through consumption, unless I paused to intentionally do something with it.
Hearing a book and listening to a book are two different things. To know that you understood the author's intended meaning through listening (not hearing) requires a feedback process between yourself and your expression of that understanding (ie journalling/writing) or between you and someone else to help you make sense of it. Hearing a book is like bingeing Netflix. You're getting through it while being entertained and stimulated rather than enriched.
You really get what mean here by asserting that the medium changes the engagement. This argument seems to be over the heads of many, but of course the people who get it are the ones I also respect from their effortful engagement with ideas. @Justin Ross mentioned that he asks himself if wise people do the thing under consideration which I thought was an unusual metric, but I do the same. That said, many people would say “how can you know the person is wise”? to which I have little answer other than you can see it from their life outcomes. This goes back to judgment, by which I mean the outcome of discernment, which you and I have been circling around for a while. An examination of the prohibition on judgment is coming next.
Like many internet users I spend too much time taking in information. It's amazing when you tear yourself away that you suddenly have a deeper understanding of the stuff you've been reading as your mind works on it in silence.
I'll listen to a podcast in the car (it beats talk radio because of the high spot load), but I want to see words on a written page if possible.
Audio forces you to digest (or not digest) things at the pace of the lector. Reading lets you take your time, thinking and savoring, rereading things as needed.
It's not unlike wolfing down a McMeal in the car versus having a nice 2-3 hour dinner.
"Prestige laundering" is great coinage. People will go to great lengths to defend not reading something. It's elitist, ableist, problematic, colonial, etc. It's not elitist to say that some books are better than others, or that reading results in deeper understanding of a text but people will argue that it is until they're blue in the face.
I've long suspected that a lot of people who rail against "canon" are simply trying to give their intellectual laziness the sheen of legitimacy by manufacturing an ethical gripe ("the western canon is mostly written by Dead White Males, therefore me not reading it is a moral stand").
Except I don't know where these Alan Bloom acolytes are, shoving the western canon down the throats of impressionable students. I've encountered WAY more profs, students, articles, and essays that argue against canon than for it.
I think you’re right in that these people dismissing canon are more socially accepted than those who insist effortful reading of western canonical texts matters
Thank you for justifying the vague unease I get from audiobooks (or e-readers, for that matter). I think it was my instinct saying what you have apprehended and articulated with your intellect.
This will probably irritate people that's why I loved it! Listening can be helpful, yet it rarely forces the same pauses that reading does. The social part you mention is real too, people want the reputation of being well read because it signals discipline and judgment.
Yes. Reading is different because it's active. You can't drive while you do it, your mind can't wander, you can't play with a Rubik's cube or clean the house. You have to hold the book and collect the words yourself. Reading forces you to spend time down in the mud wrestling with messy ideas and coming up with actual thoughts of your own. Listening doesn't make you do that. Reading is active, listening is passive.
Besides, there's a litmus test I use for just about everything in my life, and it applies to this debate: do wise people do this? All of the wise people I know read all the time. I don't know any wise people who only listen to audiobooks and podcasts. That right there tells me that listening is not good enough.
I completely agree and have come to this very conclusion myself. I discovered this when one day I searched my audio library and saw some non-fiction books that I had "read" a year ago and found myself wondering what they were about! I decided to try using audio for fiction (concentration not critical) and to read non-fiction the good old way, when I can stop and think or write down my thoughts. Thanks for confirming what I already perceived!
The "prestige laundering" framing is spot on and something I haven't seen articulated quite this way before. I noticed this in myself when I realized I was "counting" audiobooks toward my reading goals without engaging nearly as deeply with the arguments. The effort gap isn't about medium, it's about the cognitive friction that slow reading forces you into - and that's hard to replicate when you're also driving or doing the dishes.
You’re still reading so they’re the same. I’m not arguing about the format of reading itself - by all means, use the kindle app on your phone. I have two kindles myself. The issue is the claim that hearing a book and reading it are the same; I have no beef with ebooks
I got the impression that reading was _more_ work for you, what with the reference to “decoding”.
I don’t decode consciously. I was taught to read phonetically. I look at the page and hear the words. Incidentally I cannot abide motivational and travel posters at home; they’re too _noisy_.
You’re correct it is more work - that’s the distinction because you simply cannot do something other than read. We didn’t evolve to read as another reader pointed out, meaning it’s more difficult in the most obvious way because something we didn’t evolve to do will be more effort than something we have selected traits for
The brain is programmable enough that you can induce something akin to synesthesia in a reader. It doesn’t matter that we didn’t evolve specifically to read. Proper reading instruction exploits a brain hack.
People who expect the mechanics of reading to be difficult may not have been properly taught. They are also far too likely to mistake bad (academic, but I repeat myself) writing for towering erudition.
A good writer, like Thomas Sowell, can write simply and clearly about complex and/or subtle subjects without getting in the reader’s way. Readers who expect the text to be difficult are often less than impressed.
German philosophers may enjoy an inflated reputation simply because their bad academic prose in German gets ineptly translated into even worse prose in English.
“Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
So true! I also read faster than most speech, and my mind needs the stimulation of being fed information faster than the spoken word. Like you, I find that my attention starts to wander during most lectures, even if the content is very interesting, because it just isn't coming fast enough to fully engage my attention. I much prefer to read than to view a video, except some with a great deal of visual content that supplies the additional information "feed". Podcasts are even worse, no video content and slow delivery. I do read e-books because it is very convenient but also have a large library of real paper books.
It’s funny a commenter above said because of neurodivergence it’s not fair to claim what I did, but sounds like you and I can claim neurodivergence, which is that we built our cognitive capacity such that we read faster than people can speak. That required effort, and doesn’t come naturally. I took refuge in books since childhood and that’s why I can read so quickly, and it follows that others like us can read quickly because we exercised the muscle. People are reacting to this essay as though I committed heresy, with similar straw men as I’ve seen on my essays about gender.
This comment got posted out of place, I have copied it here.
Neurodivergence? I am very introverted, perhaps part of why I have always enjoyed the solitary time spent reading (taking refuge in books sounds very familiar), but what does neurodivergence mean, anyway? "Divergence" as a concept only makes sense if there is a large population around the statistical mean to represent the "norm", from which the outliers are "divergent". I think "neurodivergent" is a trendy new term which, as typically used, covers real conditions and a number of others that people claim to have to feel special or as an excuse for other problems.
Perhaps my very fast reading ability with good comprehension and retention of the content is a learned skill through effort but if so I don't remember how I did it, I could read before I started school because my parents read to me. The skill has certainly been very useful in my technical career.
Perhaps I enjoy reading your posts because we think along the same lines. Welcome back, by the way. I am a (now semi-retired) engineer in the oil and gas industry. When I started women were definitely a minority in this male-dominated business, and so my more analytical and less emotional style fit the industry and the men running it very well. There are more women in oil and gas now, and I'm not close enough to the workplace to know if women's culture has made inroads there. Likely not to any great extent, though. I don't think that the touchy-feely feminized way of managing the workplace that you and others discuss will ever be a thing in critical industries like oil and gas, power plant operation, heavy industry, and others where the dangers are very real and a mistake means disaster. There is no room for feelings or substandard performance. Women who try to pull that kind of emotional blackmail will probably not get very far unless they are also competent at the work they are actually paid to do.
I’ve seen in my own career the difference between those who think deeply and those who just show up at work thinking they can do nothing outside of it and still get to the top
I think I had phonics in the third or fourth grade, but I had already figured out on my own the sounds of the letters. The letters as symbols for language must have made sense to me at a very early age.
I have a system. I bounce at a bar on weekends which involves a lot of time standing around watching a crowd. It's brain down time. So I have for the last six or seven years listened to audio books while I work. I have completed over 100 titles. I agree you don't retain as much, but the audiobook is just the preview. If it's good I buy a physical copy and read the book. If it's really good I read it again and make notes. About 50 or 60 have made this cut.
So to me audiobooks absolutely have value, but not in and of themselves.
They do but I’m not arguing they don’t. I’m saying that people collapse the distinction to claim discipline they didn’t exercise. If you hear them, that’s just fine and not my objection.
I've been listening to Postman 😅 and wondering about this. The net effect of quitting audio books would be that I consume far less written information. I don't engage deeply with everything I listen to, but not all of it is worth deep engagement.
Then again, when listening to The Prince, do I really want to embark on a deep dive into Renaissance geopolitics, or is it enough to skim across the surface in an effort to sample a classic while providing fodder for lateral thinking?
I spent the first 20 years of my life with no TV and developed a typographic mind. I also was clueless about how to communicate with my peers, and very narrowly informed. Still figuring out the best mix....
I think listening is fine for “light” stuff (however defined) but for serious fiction I prefer to read. I only read fiction these days except for Substacks like this one or technical docs related to work.
I’m a music professor and I have to remind my students, over and over, about the difference between hearing and listening. It’s so easy to turn listening—a foreground activity—into hearing—a background activity—that we often don’t notice the change has happened. We’re biologically wired to “think less” with our ears than with other senses.
How often is someone who is “listening” to an audio book really only “hearing” it?
But, to the larger point, I am always saddened by how much we are all encouraged to eschew any/all friction. To me, the whole point of any intellectual activity (and most physical ones for that matter) is the slog. Working through something difficult *is* the point, not the “I finished” part.
To quote an album title from 1987: “Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death.”
I appreciate this distinction you made, which I didn’t and should have. I treated hearing and listening as the same but you’re correct that they’re distinct. And the thing about audiobooks is the ease with which it can become background noise.
Yes. It’s the ease with which we slip between listening (actively) and hearing (passively) that I am always trying to point out. I catch myself, **constantly**, slipping into semi-ignoring what I am “hearing,” which then means it’s little more than background noise. You can’t really read as a background activity. Reading **must** be the foreground activity, making it a different thing than listening/hearing.
I think I am ok with folks insisting that listening *can* be “useful” and/or “effective,” but it’s silly to insist it’s “the same” as reading.
Honestly, I've had that same experience when reading. My mind wanders while my eyes keep moving along the text, even registering the individual words. Maybe it's just me.
I enjoy non-fiction as audio, but have a much harder time with fiction. I can no longer imagine distinct voices when constantly hearing the voice of the reader. I lose track of the setting easily as well.
Seems like hearing an author read passages from their novel at bookstore would have a similar effect. I've never done that so I wouldn't know. 🤔
You might try sticking with reading; sounds like you haven’t built the habit.
Thanks for the reply. I used to read all the time but due to my age and years of screen time that is required by my job, I've found that audiobooks give my eyes time to rest. I usually do not multitask while listening. It's possible that there are circumstances that make either option more or less appropriate for any individual. Maybe I'll pick up some fiction and give it a go.
Thank you for this distinction. It’s very helpful to me.
A few years ago, I made an effort to listen to audiobooks, but had very little success retaining anything. I kept pausing the recording to consider the idea, scene, or description, which annoyed me even though that is what I do when reading a book. It felt like I was wasting my time.
I couldn’t understand how my friends listened to so many books (fiction and nonfiction). Finally, after asking every audiobook fan I knew for their routines and experiences, I finally understood that my friends were satisfied with a more distracted or multitasked experience than I was. (What you have defined as hearing vs listening.) Once I understood that our expectations were different, I stopped trying to force myself to use audiobooks except as an aid to reading.
And this means they are really just hearing, not even listening. And it boggles the mind that they’re ok with this and call it “learning”
I look forward to your writing because you write with clarity and conviction, and you don't shy away from expressing views that will challenge mainstream ideas. This one got me thinking about my own practices, and why I've never been interested in audiobooks.
Consumption of information is overrated because knowing more stuff doesn't translate into increased intelligence in navigating life or character development. I'm more likely to contemplate how to implement something I read that stuck with me than anything I heard through consumption, unless I paused to intentionally do something with it.
Hearing a book and listening to a book are two different things. To know that you understood the author's intended meaning through listening (not hearing) requires a feedback process between yourself and your expression of that understanding (ie journalling/writing) or between you and someone else to help you make sense of it. Hearing a book is like bingeing Netflix. You're getting through it while being entertained and stimulated rather than enriched.
You really get what mean here by asserting that the medium changes the engagement. This argument seems to be over the heads of many, but of course the people who get it are the ones I also respect from their effortful engagement with ideas. @Justin Ross mentioned that he asks himself if wise people do the thing under consideration which I thought was an unusual metric, but I do the same. That said, many people would say “how can you know the person is wise”? to which I have little answer other than you can see it from their life outcomes. This goes back to judgment, by which I mean the outcome of discernment, which you and I have been circling around for a while. An examination of the prohibition on judgment is coming next.
Like many internet users I spend too much time taking in information. It's amazing when you tear yourself away that you suddenly have a deeper understanding of the stuff you've been reading as your mind works on it in silence.
The proliferation of audiobooks is also related to the decline of silence
Anuradha, I have to listen to your podcasts more than once. I miss so much the first time because I'm so busy digesting the last bit.
That is a compliment. Some podcasts aren't worth listening to even once.
I'll listen to a podcast in the car (it beats talk radio because of the high spot load), but I want to see words on a written page if possible.
Audio forces you to digest (or not digest) things at the pace of the lector. Reading lets you take your time, thinking and savoring, rereading things as needed.
It's not unlike wolfing down a McMeal in the car versus having a nice 2-3 hour dinner.
"Prestige laundering" is great coinage. People will go to great lengths to defend not reading something. It's elitist, ableist, problematic, colonial, etc. It's not elitist to say that some books are better than others, or that reading results in deeper understanding of a text but people will argue that it is until they're blue in the face.
I've long suspected that a lot of people who rail against "canon" are simply trying to give their intellectual laziness the sheen of legitimacy by manufacturing an ethical gripe ("the western canon is mostly written by Dead White Males, therefore me not reading it is a moral stand").
Except I don't know where these Alan Bloom acolytes are, shoving the western canon down the throats of impressionable students. I've encountered WAY more profs, students, articles, and essays that argue against canon than for it.
I think you’re right in that these people dismissing canon are more socially accepted than those who insist effortful reading of western canonical texts matters
Oh please read Mary Harrington's essays on the lost skill of memorisation (the real deal) as it ties directly into this thesis of "deep thought"
Thank you for justifying the vague unease I get from audiobooks (or e-readers, for that matter). I think it was my instinct saying what you have apprehended and articulated with your intellect.
This will probably irritate people that's why I loved it! Listening can be helpful, yet it rarely forces the same pauses that reading does. The social part you mention is real too, people want the reputation of being well read because it signals discipline and judgment.
Judgment is coming next - it’s never been more necessary, less individually valued or more socially valuable
Yes. Reading is different because it's active. You can't drive while you do it, your mind can't wander, you can't play with a Rubik's cube or clean the house. You have to hold the book and collect the words yourself. Reading forces you to spend time down in the mud wrestling with messy ideas and coming up with actual thoughts of your own. Listening doesn't make you do that. Reading is active, listening is passive.
Besides, there's a litmus test I use for just about everything in my life, and it applies to this debate: do wise people do this? All of the wise people I know read all the time. I don't know any wise people who only listen to audiobooks and podcasts. That right there tells me that listening is not good enough.
In some ways this is just another example of using a book as furniture, or a fashion accessory, or fan apparel.
I completely agree and have come to this very conclusion myself. I discovered this when one day I searched my audio library and saw some non-fiction books that I had "read" a year ago and found myself wondering what they were about! I decided to try using audio for fiction (concentration not critical) and to read non-fiction the good old way, when I can stop and think or write down my thoughts. Thanks for confirming what I already perceived!
The "prestige laundering" framing is spot on and something I haven't seen articulated quite this way before. I noticed this in myself when I realized I was "counting" audiobooks toward my reading goals without engaging nearly as deeply with the arguments. The effort gap isn't about medium, it's about the cognitive friction that slow reading forces you into - and that's hard to replicate when you're also driving or doing the dishes.
What's your take (if you have one) on ebooks?
You’re still reading so they’re the same. I’m not arguing about the format of reading itself - by all means, use the kindle app on your phone. I have two kindles myself. The issue is the claim that hearing a book and reading it are the same; I have no beef with ebooks
I have the opposite problem. My mind often wanders when listening to anything but the most riveting speaker.
When reading I concentrate better. I also read more quickly than most people speak.
And that distinction is precisely why I was impelled to make the argument
I got the impression that reading was _more_ work for you, what with the reference to “decoding”.
I don’t decode consciously. I was taught to read phonetically. I look at the page and hear the words. Incidentally I cannot abide motivational and travel posters at home; they’re too _noisy_.
You’re correct it is more work - that’s the distinction because you simply cannot do something other than read. We didn’t evolve to read as another reader pointed out, meaning it’s more difficult in the most obvious way because something we didn’t evolve to do will be more effort than something we have selected traits for
The brain is programmable enough that you can induce something akin to synesthesia in a reader. It doesn’t matter that we didn’t evolve specifically to read. Proper reading instruction exploits a brain hack.
People who expect the mechanics of reading to be difficult may not have been properly taught. They are also far too likely to mistake bad (academic, but I repeat myself) writing for towering erudition.
A good writer, like Thomas Sowell, can write simply and clearly about complex and/or subtle subjects without getting in the reader’s way. Readers who expect the text to be difficult are often less than impressed.
German philosophers may enjoy an inflated reputation simply because their bad academic prose in German gets ineptly translated into even worse prose in English.
I won't lie I struggle to read the Germans; even Plato in translation is easier.
You are not alone.
“Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
Mark Twain
_A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court_
Try Harry Frankfurter. There’s a philosopher who can _write_.
So true! I also read faster than most speech, and my mind needs the stimulation of being fed information faster than the spoken word. Like you, I find that my attention starts to wander during most lectures, even if the content is very interesting, because it just isn't coming fast enough to fully engage my attention. I much prefer to read than to view a video, except some with a great deal of visual content that supplies the additional information "feed". Podcasts are even worse, no video content and slow delivery. I do read e-books because it is very convenient but also have a large library of real paper books.
It’s funny a commenter above said because of neurodivergence it’s not fair to claim what I did, but sounds like you and I can claim neurodivergence, which is that we built our cognitive capacity such that we read faster than people can speak. That required effort, and doesn’t come naturally. I took refuge in books since childhood and that’s why I can read so quickly, and it follows that others like us can read quickly because we exercised the muscle. People are reacting to this essay as though I committed heresy, with similar straw men as I’ve seen on my essays about gender.
This comment got posted out of place, I have copied it here.
Neurodivergence? I am very introverted, perhaps part of why I have always enjoyed the solitary time spent reading (taking refuge in books sounds very familiar), but what does neurodivergence mean, anyway? "Divergence" as a concept only makes sense if there is a large population around the statistical mean to represent the "norm", from which the outliers are "divergent". I think "neurodivergent" is a trendy new term which, as typically used, covers real conditions and a number of others that people claim to have to feel special or as an excuse for other problems.
Perhaps my very fast reading ability with good comprehension and retention of the content is a learned skill through effort but if so I don't remember how I did it, I could read before I started school because my parents read to me. The skill has certainly been very useful in my technical career.
You're basically reading my mind right now. I too have such a career - what do you do?
Perhaps I enjoy reading your posts because we think along the same lines. Welcome back, by the way. I am a (now semi-retired) engineer in the oil and gas industry. When I started women were definitely a minority in this male-dominated business, and so my more analytical and less emotional style fit the industry and the men running it very well. There are more women in oil and gas now, and I'm not close enough to the workplace to know if women's culture has made inroads there. Likely not to any great extent, though. I don't think that the touchy-feely feminized way of managing the workplace that you and others discuss will ever be a thing in critical industries like oil and gas, power plant operation, heavy industry, and others where the dangers are very real and a mistake means disaster. There is no room for feelings or substandard performance. Women who try to pull that kind of emotional blackmail will probably not get very far unless they are also competent at the work they are actually paid to do.
I’ve seen in my own career the difference between those who think deeply and those who just show up at work thinking they can do nothing outside of it and still get to the top
Either you were properly taught to read phonetically, or you are smarter than I am. (or both) Most Americans are neither.
I don't remember being taught to read, but I grew up during the phonics era, thank heavens.
I think I had phonics in the third or fourth grade, but I had already figured out on my own the sounds of the letters. The letters as symbols for language must have made sense to me at a very early age.
I have a system. I bounce at a bar on weekends which involves a lot of time standing around watching a crowd. It's brain down time. So I have for the last six or seven years listened to audio books while I work. I have completed over 100 titles. I agree you don't retain as much, but the audiobook is just the preview. If it's good I buy a physical copy and read the book. If it's really good I read it again and make notes. About 50 or 60 have made this cut.
So to me audiobooks absolutely have value, but not in and of themselves.
They do but I’m not arguing they don’t. I’m saying that people collapse the distinction to claim discipline they didn’t exercise. If you hear them, that’s just fine and not my objection.