For this Monday’s post, I’m pleased to present you with an insightful article from Linda Cartwright, an educator and freelance writer, who brings thought-provoking messages to her written works. I was fortunate to meet Linda through a guest post (on self-publishing) she wrote for a fellow blogger.

Linda’s post provides information on a topic of increasing interest to me: audio consumption of books. I’m excited to share Linda’s article with you and am quite confident that you will learn from the food for thought she introduces. For more content from Linda, you can follow her here on Twitter. Enjoy today’s guest post!

Will audiobooks replace books?

Audiobooks are definitely here to stay; they are not a passing fad. Yet will they replace traditional books entirely? Spoiler alert: they might. It’s not the end of the world as we know it, though. Let’s find out what makes audiobooks so compelling, and are they capable of causing text’s demise?

 

Why we love them

Better ask why shouldn’t we love them – because the number of benefits is impressive and I could go on an entire day. Off the top of my head:

• They give people with impaired vision access to literature treasures.
• They allow people with dyslexia to enjoy great books without struggle.
• They allow us to take in great stories and valuable insights in situations when reading would be impossible, for example when we drive, ride a bike, or clean the house.
• They save us time! Listening to a story is quicker than reading it unless you speed-read (then of course, if you are a productivity freak you can speed-listen as well).
• They alleviate the strain on our eyes. As a blogger and a contributor who provides paper help to students, I love text – that’s why I made it central to my life. Yet sometimes it’s too much for my eyes. In the evening, when my work is done I love to immerse in a cozy and witty story and give my eyes a break from letterforms.
• They are just better at delivering some things. For example, sarcasm is communicated better through the speech. If you think that audio couldn’t ever match the delight of poring over a page, I suggest you’d listen to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy read by Douglas Adams. Voice is such a powerful instrument!
• You learn the correct pronunciation of many tricky words that you only meet in books, but hardly ever in real life. 
• You can share this experience with someone and listen together.

Where they fall short

The argument that the opponents of audiobooks use most often is that you cannot enjoy the book in all the exquisite nuanced glory when you merely listen to it. Listening is somehow seen as cheating, shortcutting, and squeezing information from the book without really experiencing it. 

However, I beg to disagree. Reading the text is not inherently meditative. You can still skim through the text and flip the pages of the book hurriedly mining for information. 

As for the “shortcutting”, I would count that one in only for kids who learn how to read and “cheat” by listening to the story they were supposed to decode and process visually. After you graduate school, reading should become automatic – not some cognitive challenge one cunningly circumvents. 

With listening, just as with reading, you are able to soak in the style, savor the words and cadences, and rewind to listen again to favorite passages. Some voice actors are brilliant at delivering all the things that seem lifeless in writing – poetry, Shakespeare, comedy. So many genres are actually better when you listen rather than read!

In fact, reading as a solitary activity is comparatively recent. Through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and even Modern Period, reading used to be widespread as a group activity where one reader entertained several listeners.

Audiobooks also came under the scrutiny of the researchers right after they were first mass-produced and released for cassette players. Researchers have been particularly interested in information retention. They are still interested. The problem is, there are no consistent results to prove that audiobooks are better, same, or worse than text books in that regard. It looks as if the retention is slightly worse when people listen instead of reading, but that is attributed to the fact that modern people are just bad at listening. The skill, however, improves with practice, so no real evidence of audio being less efficient exists.

The only thing where audiobooks really drop the ball is spelling. While the number of books someone has read correlates with spelling proficiency, it isn’t so for audiobooks listened. So, boys and girls, you will still have to learn reading and writing, no cheating here.

Is there any cause for alarm?

More often than not, when someone is asking, “Will X replace Y?” what they actually mean is: “The world is changing, should I be worried?” Mild cases of neophobia happen to the best of us, so there is nothing wrong with caution and a healthy dose of skepticism. When new technology rolls in, people tend to ask the same questions about it. 

• Is it bad for our health?
• Is it bad for our morals?
• Will it dumb us down?
• Will people use it for something criminal?
• Will people use it for something sexual?

As usual, the answers are, respectively: 

• It depends.
• Not really.
• Nope.
• Probably.
• Definitely.

Those questions were asked in our living memory about TV, video games, the Internet, and smartphones. And of course, those questions were asked about audiobooks. Before that – e-books. Before that – printed books. Before that – the writing itself. No kidding. 

Socrates was dead against the written word. He said that young people would become forgetful should they learn to write and read, because they wouldn’t have to remember anything ever again. Moreover, he believed that information in the written form is lifeless and fake – mere data, not real knowledge. Being always accessible, it would spoil young people and discourage them from actively seeking true wisdom. Doesn’t it remind you of something? I used to hear the same arguments about the Internet and search engines, in particular All. The. Time.

As I see it, even if audiobooks will replace books, it shouldn’t cause the end of the world. People will be worse at spelling – that’s likely. However, if they will consume more books, scientific, fiction, and all – that’s not such a bad tradeoff after all. 

Still, I don’t think we are in for the complete paradigm shift. Books will be books. People will want to curl up with their favorite tome in the comfy chair. People will read to their children. It’s not like books are going away. Books didn’t go away when radio rolled in. They stayed here when movies arrived. Internet came around and brought us the joys of self-publishing.

A new way of life swayed the popularity of some ways to experience books. When people used to communicate verbally all the time, they used to choose books as a haven of peace and quiet, downtime, me-time.

Today, people consume so much information in text form – endless feeds of social media and news, and private messages, and company chats, and emails. We want to shut all this noise out and we have chosen the book once again to be our moment of blissful silence. Even if it sounds.