Is listening to a book cheating?

No, audiobooks are not a lesser art form than printed books . Although audiobooks are the fastest growing segment of publishing, there are still plenty of people who believe that listening to a book is somehow low and lazy, that, put baldly, it’s cheating. I suppose this attitude springs from the “work ethic” in which we Americans are said to believe.

In this view, reading is virtuous in the same way that working is – while listening amounts to some kind of handout. But is listening to a book cheating ? For one thing, the question doesn’t even make sense for people with impaired vision or reading disorders like dyslexia. Furthermore, for the millions whose days include commuting and generally slogging away at dull tasks, audiobooks have arrived to redeem time lost to drudgery and tedium.



Listeners are able to enjoy books they’d never have had time to otherwise. In this respect, audiobooks were made for getting things done. Disparaging audiobooks often springs from the feeling that a listener can’t take in a book as fully as a reader can.

Neuroscientists have, of course, weighed in on the subject. The conclusion reached in the arduously titled 2019 study “The Representation of Semantic Information Across Human Cerebral Cortex During Listening Versus Reading is Invariant to Stimulus Modality” from the Journal of Neuroscience is, in a nutshell, that we understand words whether they are read or heard. Because neuroscience can’t separate what our brains are doing from what our minds are thinking, this revelation doesn’t really address the question of comprehension as it applies to books.

Most audiobook listeners know very well that the experiences of reading and listening to a book are different; for one thing, the listener tends to retain less of most books than the reader does..