It’s like clockwork, if you have a very repetitive and broken clock: Every so often, on one social platform or another, an argument kicks up about what counts as reading a book. A long time ago, people would occasionally argue about whether ebooks were real books—a line of fruitless discourse that seems almost funny now. (Somewhere, someone is probably still arguing about this. Let’s ignore them.)
The one that keeps coming around, a broken clock with a discordant chime, is audiobooks. There’s a semantics argument buried in here about reading vs. listening, but that’s picking an uninteresting nit. Audiobooks count as reading. Listening to an audiobook is no better or worse than reading a book on paper or a screen. You’ve still experienced the same story, just in a different format.
There’s no wrong—or right—way to read a book. There are just the ways that work and don’t work for each reader. Sometimes that means reading fast; sometimes it takes months. Sometimes the right way to read a book is to put it down entirely, and find it again later.
So why does this argument keep happening? The list of reasons is long, and includes traditionalists, ableism, simple pettiness, and people feeling defensive about their own choices. But maybe it’s also a little more personal than that.
Some of it is, of course, just the internet, where we fight about everything. Books are online, so we fight about them, but books are still books, and so the fight is specific. Reading is a solitary activity. It’s seemingly the opposite of the internet: a quiet place with a central narrative. (To be fair, both can have an overabundance of conflict.)
And yet we’ve created a million ways to bring these things together, from Goodreads to BookTok and everything that came before and will come after. Some of the inevitable conflict is the same conflict that plays out across the internet in every arena: forceful opinions get more traction and attention than mild ones, so everything becomes love or hate, best or worst, transformative or destructive. Nuance, no matter how much we love it in fiction, goes out the window.
Reading isn’t just solitary; it’s deeply personal. No two people will ever read a book exactly the same way—not physically speaking, in terms of where you read it, and how fast, and how old you are, and not emotionally speaking, either. Our experiences with books are our own, no matter how much some of us talk about them online.
And that deep, intimate connection—the very thing that makes books such a big part of our lives—it can be deeply weird to see it play out a different way for a different person. There are books I don’t talk about much because I’m just not capable of processing other people’s negative opinions of them. I need to keep those close to my heart and let them be mine in my own way. There are books about which I bite my tongue and sit on my hands and don’t say the critical things I want to say, because I can tell they’re gold to someone else.
It can feel, sometimes, like someone else’s experience of a book is in conflict with your own. Like one of you is doing it wrong. You’re not: there is no wrong. But that feeling happens and then we get arguments and gatekeeping, people trying to draw lines about how a book should be read and by whom, and in what format, and under what circumstances, and how of course no one else will appreciate it properly. Sometimes people do this with the intent to create a little garden where books are a certain, perfect way. It’s meant to be cozy and comforting for them. That garden, though, still has a gate.
The argument about whether audiobooks “count” is an argument that rises from people feeling protective and defensive about how they spend their time, and how they define themselves as “readers.” You can’t do much else while you read print—well, maybe listen to music, depending on how you’re wired. But you can read an audiobook while driving, washing dishes, exercising, crafting, showering, and probably a whole lot of other things I’ve never considered. For a certain kind of book person, that isn’t pure reading, and they reject it.
But reading isn’t pure. Reading is built of trees and dirt and ink and context, of feelings and thoughts and the whole of what’s inside your head colliding with a select piece of what was inside the author’s head when they wrote the book you’re reading. It’s cross-pollination. It’s chocolate in the peanut butter. And, crucially, it’s not about the object that is the book. It’s not about the CDs we used to listen to audiobooks on, or the screen you’re reading this on. It’s about ideas and words and thoughts, which swirl around impurely from person to person.
Book purists, like so many kinds of purists, should be allowed to treat books how they like. They just shouldn’t be allowed to impose those ideas on the rest of us, who are not book purists but simply readers. If you are not a purist, there is no wrong way to read a book. This isn’t just about format, but about so many implied ideas about how we ought to read. For example:
You don’t have to finish every book you start. Life is too short. There are so many books. Obligation is no way to enjoy a story. Not every book is going to click with you. And sometimes you pick a book up at the wrong moment! N.K. Jemisin is now one of my favorite authors, but when The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms came out, I kept just not reading it. I couldn’t tell you why. But I devoured the Dreamblood Duology and everything since, and now I’m doling her first three books out to myself, slowly, so I can enjoy them for longer.
There is no right or wrong time to read a book. It’s never too late. It can, sort of, be too early, but then you can always go back. (The only thing I remember from my 8-year-old self’s reading of A Wrinkle in Time is that I didn’t understand anything, and It was terrifying. I got a lot more out of it later.)
You don’t have to read the books everyone else is reading. When I was a bookseller, if there was a very popular book that everyone else in the store was reading, I didn’t read it unless I really wanted to. Why, when everyone else already had an opinion, and I could point customers to my colleagues or say that everyone else loved it? Did anyone need another opinion on Red Rising? Nah. I’d be better off finding something unsung to recommend. Sometimes you’re better off walking your own path. Learning to enjoy not having an opinion is truly one of the greatest parts of being an online person, reader or otherwise.
Buy the Book
Witch King
You don’t have to treat your books like gold. Write in them. Dogear the pages. Use bacon as a bookmark if you really want to. Or wrap them in cellophane and keep them out of the sun, and handle them only with white gloves. As Anne Fadiman once explained, there are courtly and carnal lovers of books: those who treat the objects like rare jewels, and those whose books look entirely different when they’re finished reading them. You do you. Don’t let any of those memes call you a chaos goblin unless you want to be one. (You can also be both kinds of book lover for different books. It’s kind of like being an introvert and an extrovert depending on the situation.)
Read books in whatever format you like to read them. Read them on your phone. Read them in bed. Read while eating. Go to a bar and get a drink (of any sort) and read alone. (Reading at a bar alone is one of life’s great pleasures, as far as I’m concerned.) Listen to books while you clean the bathroom. If I could keep earbuds in my ears I’d probably listen to books while running. Do whatever works. The point is the words, not how you get them into your brain.
It’s okay to skip parts. When my mom read The Lord of the Rings to me when I was 10, I insisted she read every poem and song. She resisted, but I held strong. And for the next four or five years, when I made my then-annual reading pilgrimage to Middle-earth, what did I do? I skipped all the goddamn songs. The child purist in me had been defeated by the realization that there were so many more books to read. Your experience with a book is just that: yours. There are books where you can’t skip anything without missing out considerably. But short story collections? Essays? Skip as needed. Not everything has to be for you.
You can be well-read without having read the classics. What does well-read even mean? Decide that for yourself, and shape your reading to suit.
If you’re a reader, you read. That’s all. Ideally, for me, this means reading widely, diversely, curiously, with as few preconceived notions as possible about what kind of books you do and don’t like. Just keep turning pages—or hitting play.
Originally published July 2021.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. You can also find her on Twitter.
As a history teacher who enjoys books in all possible formats, this debate gains a certain urgency when teachers and professors get together and argue about letting students read assigned books for class. I know teachers who INSIST students read physical copies whereas I don’t care. My only concern is if you want to discuss passages it can sometimes be difficult for ebook or audio readers to find the same passages.
And one side note. I am fine with not treating books like gold, but please make sure they are, in fact YOUR books. If it’s a library book, please don’t write in them, dog ear them or use them as coasters. Please?
I love this. It’s painful to hear people say that audiobooks “aren’t reading”. What am I supposed to tell my dyslexic sister or students, who struggle to enjoy a story because there’s a disconnect? What about my blind students? What about me, a person with adhd, who sometimes gets lucky and can hyperfocus on a text copy, but often can not? It’s so deeply rooted in ableism and people (including myself) don’t like to have to face that.
The only time I disagree, as a former public school teacher, is when you are early on teaching students how to read. In that case, it’s more complex. When it’s about learning HOW, and building reading proficiency, that’s different. But that’s not usually what people are talking about.
I learned to speed read at 8. I read at least 6 books a week between 20 and 50. I think I missed a lot. I now have 1023 books from audible (quite an investment) and I listen to every word and miss nothing. I use the audio books to help me ease into sleep and to wake up. Physics treatise to Daisy Dalrymple! Bless the technology that allows me to continue my book journey at 68 and with cataracts. I love the 21st century! With all the wonderful voices decorating my imagination I get different pictures in my head to enjoy. Travelling is a pleasure and I no longer leave a library of books in airport lounges or exceed my baggage allowance. Just, please – don’t dramatize them!
Any way that people can get the info in books that works best for them–definitely!
I usually don’t write in books I read just to read (some of my copies of Hannah Arendt’s works are the exception) but I did underline and make notes in books I read for class or grad school course work.
Jumping in to post my agreement with @1 FridayNext. I had to stop lending books to people because they wouldn’t treat them the way I wanted them treated. No concern at all if it’s your copy. But definitely don’t go marking in my books and for heaven’s sake – NO SPINE BREAKING.
More to the point of the post, I think identifying as a reader is indeed part of the problem, but I think it goes even more primal than that. I think a lot of the purity “you must read a book xxxxx way” comes partly from a desire for people to experience the story the same way we did. We want others to feel, cry, shout, rave, huddle, and cheer in the same ways we did because of how transcendent and beautiful reading can be. There’s a sort of vicarious joy we get when we find others who not only like what we do, but like it to the same degree and with the same passion. I think it may also be from a desire to connect with those like you, especially with something so individual as reading, and the internet has taught us just how not unique we are – there are loads of people out there (to one degree or another) like me. And we feel that fear of somebody missing out that we start to demand they do things the same way we do to prevent it. FOMO on someone else’s behalf.
I find it interesting to read your thoughts on e-books. Although I don’t have anything against others reading e-books, for myself for reasons I can’t quite explain I can’t get as much out of them as real books. I love reading real books, and I love listening to audiobooks, but can’t really read e-books in any format. I read the Harry Potter series on an Amazon Kindle and to this day wish I had read a physical copy.
Love this article! And it has made me think twice about criticizing a book.
Any artform is all the richer for having multiple venues to enjoy it. You can enjoy music at a live concert, on the radio, via an LP be it vinyl, CD, cassestte, etc. streaming. Why not embrace all the different mediums that books come in? Or not like you say.
I read physical books to include comics and graphic novels, Kindle ebooks or digital comics, and I recently have been giving Audible a try.
The magic of books is they tell a story differently to each individual reader so it only make sense that a true reader will embrace the book in whatever form he, she, they, want to.
While I agree that there’s no wrong way to read, I just can’t agree with you that you “read” an audiobook. It uses completely different senses, and that affects the way you understand, and are affected by, the story. I challenge anyone to both read a book and listen to an audiobook and honestly tell me they got exactly the same thing out of each “reading”.
@1: “My only concern is if you want to discuss passages it can sometimes be difficult for ebook … to find the same passages.”
Not so! Perhaps in high school you might all have the same edition and can find a passage by page number, but the one literature class I took in university, we were all reading very different editions. All I need is three consecutive words to search for a passage in an ebook, and I’ll probably find it just as fast as the people all reading from the same paper edition.
@3: “Travelling is a pleasure and I no longer leave a library of books in airport lounges or exceed my baggage allowance.”
Amen to that! Though I have left my Kobo in a hotel. They mailed it back to me for $25 and it was worth every penny! But I remember travelling in France at the end of the ’90s, and my wife and I left a trail of paperbacks behind us in the B&Bs.
I’m OKwith dramatizations. I have a lovely multi-CD copy of a dramatization of the Lord of the Rings, and I finally came to Neil Gaiman through the fine dramatization of Neverwhere.
Finally, I’ve read Fadiman’s book, and I theoretically understand “carnal” book lovers… but you’re all still evil! One of the great joys of my wife and I going electronic is that I no longer have to witness what she does to paper books.
There is a major contradiction in this artlcle. First, you claim that in listening to an audiobook rather than reading the book, “You’ve still experienced the same story, just in a different format.” Then you say “No two people will ever read a book exactly the same way.” Precisely and that includes the narrator. Reading a book aloud is a work of interpretation. I’ve read books and I’ve listened to the same books as audio books and it is a different experience of a different book, just as every production of a play is a different interpretation and all are different from reading the play. The plot may be the same (although I’d argue not necessarily), but the interpretation of the theme? The interpretation of characters? These are all heavily influenced by the narrator’s choices.
I’ve listened to audiobooks while doing other things. Please stop lying to yourself that you are attending to the book. Or possibly you are lying to yourself about attending to that other task. It is literally impossible to attend to two things at the same time. I’ve listened to audiobooks while a passenger in a plane or a car and I’ve attended to the book. But as a driver? I’d damned well better not.
If we’re talking about recreational reading — eh, whatever. Enjoy it however you enjoy it. But if we’re talking about reading for understanding and for content and for detail …. it’s painfully obvious when my students have listened to a book while doing other things rather than read it or listened to it attentively.
As for abelism — as with any other disability we make accommodations. If a person genuinely is incapable of reading print, obviously we accommodate that. That might be audiobooks. It might be Braille. It might be books printed in a new typeface.
Remember when books used to be rare, one read, many listened. Many C19th novels were serialised in the expectation that one person would read to the whole family , often Father reading while Mother & daughters did their sewing.
In our family reading TLOTR was an important communal experience – with my parents when I was a student, with husband & sons years later.
I was a “physical book only” reader with a craving for the feel and smell of books – or so I strongly believed. Until I stopped exclusively working as a translator from home and started interpreting. A tablet with web access became my companion and I found myself setting up an account at an online bookstore and reading ebooks in breaks.
Then I discovered Tor.com and other sites where I could download or directly read books and stories. I don’t need shelf space and ten pounds of paper anymore to read in the Feynman lectures whenever I like (just as I can now watch lectures from Oxford, Yale, MIT and others in physical chemistry online, which I started during COVID-19 as that is where I come from professionally).
I feel so much richer through these possibilities and many others in music, arts, and literature that I would never swap them for the limited world of printed outdated encyclopedias and text books, records, …, well, you name it.
Still, the smell of a certain type of book can take me back to childhood days of blissfully reading adventure, SF, travel stories, and it always puts a smile on my face and is a dear memory. The books I have are of course read from time to time (especially Pratchett and Tolkien), but I don’t think they will get too much physical company anymore.
Whether listening to an audiobook qualifies as reading is not a question I had really considered before, and at first I enjoyed thinking about it. After all, the contribution of the narrator makes it (at least in some cases) a performance, not just a text. But fairly quickly I came to realize that like categorizing specific edge cases as being science fiction or not, the discussion mostly goes to places that aren’t fundamentally interesting.
“There is no right or wrong time to read a book. It’s never too late.”
I can imagine that you can have outgrown certain books, eg for children or YA, if you read them at a later age then they are intended for, that they do not give the same satisfaction as they could have.
But maybe that is the same effect as reading some classics, especially sff, if you are an experienced reader who have read tropes now used more after the original use in a classic.
@9 People whose brains work differently than yours are not therefore “lying to themselves”.
#3 I was a ‘speed reader’ as well! In the 1960s, in Levittown, NY, my mom enrolled me during summer time at our local elementary school in a reading program. I didn’t need help reading. I just loved doing it. She found out that they had some kind of new system, this thing called ‘speed reading’ – a device and a testing system. She wanted to make sure I was occupied during the Summer days, keep me out of her hair and out of trouble, and so off she sent me. I loved it.
I was in that program all through my Elementary school years, at least I think so. My top speed was 800 words a minute with 80% comprehension. I gobbled down books like popcorn. Now, I knew that what I was getting was just a sample and a fast taste of the book. So, anything that I read that was worthwhile, I just knew I would come back to it after a bit. I did a lot of re-reading. When I read anything for the second time, I could read it slower and more slowly, leisurely strolling since I knew where I was going. Enjoying the moment, the scenery, and savoring the experience since I wasn’t in an urgent need to know where I was going to end up. I’m certain that I re-read at least everything twice. Including and especially school textbook assignments. That was the way I studied. I knew that each time I would see and feel something new about what I was reading.
I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings twice each to my late mother, and several of Tolkien’s other works once or twice each. (She loved Tolkien despite never actually “reading” any of his books.) I put a lot of my own interpretation into all those books. For example:
1. Both times I read The Fellowship of the Ring, when Frodo asks, “Who is Tom Bombadil?” and Goldberry replies, “He is,” I made sure to deliver the line as “He is,” despite the lack of italics, to avoid the unintentional implication that Tom is God.
2. In the Frodo-Boromir scene when Boromir tries to take the Ring, I deliberately made Boromir sound as calm, friendly and reasonable as possible for as long as possible before the climactic line, “For I am too strong for you, Halfling.” I felt the scene would be more disturbing and suspenseful that way, and my mother seemed to appreciate it.
3. The first time I read LotR was before the Return of the King movie came out, and I played Denethor the way he comes across to a reader of the book: as initially cold, stern and unlikeable, but not becoming deranged until Faramir is wounded. The second time, after seeing the movie, I tried as an experiment to play him as much like the movie version as Tolkien’s text allowed, i.e., already somewhat deranged from his first appearance.
4. The final time I read The Hobbit to my mother was only a few months before she died. I read the line when Bilbo goes to sleep in the Eagles’ Eyrie, “But all night he dreamed of his own house and wandered in his sleep into all his different rooms looking for something that he could not find nor remember what it looked like,” very slowly and with long pauses for emphasis. In this case I was imposing an interpretation on the line which Tolkien cannot have meant at the time he wrote it, but which is, I think, valid in retrospect. The point was not lost on my mother. She was lying in bed and was too weak by that time to want to talk more than she needed to, but she lifted up her hands and mimed moving something back and forth along her ring finger. That is one of my most precious memories of my mother. (I’ll let you decide if that counts as a pun or not.)
Don’t get me started on The Woman in White, or the Sherlock Holmes stories!
Read the way YOU wanna read. Don’t let others opinions play apart in what makes you happy. I used to be one of those that ONLY physical books matter. Then I grew up and got rid of that thinking. Physical, ebook, audio …. I do it all. Depending on how I feel. I’ve also learned to recognize that if I’m not feeling a book, it’s okay not to finish. There’s far too many books to be enjoyed. Again, do what makes YOU happy …. as long as it doesn’t affect others, go for it.
I am in a book club, and a bunch of the members swapped to primarily audiobook about 8 months ago, and it is *different* in a number of ways.
1. a lot of them miss more things from each book – you reference a particular part of the story, and you get a mix of blank stares and don’t-remembers and people who do remember that bit. (all but one are doing audiobooks-plus – jogging, errands, road trips, whatever – so of course there will be parts they were rightly distracted by something more urgent in real life!)
2. the “did you learn any new vocabulary” part [the book club has a set list of questions to make sure that everyone has *something* to say about any book they’ve read] has gone totally dry. If you’re jogging and hear a new word, you’d have to stop the book, stop jogging, and look it up, without knowing how to spell it. Similarly, passages after unknown words have gotten lost from peoples’ minds more.
3. more of them are finishing more of the books
4. more of them are sharing pieces of the books with their partners, as either the partners are around while the audiobooks are playing or are willing to listen to a snippet. It’s been *really* interesting getting those extra sides to the discussions, and it sounds like it’s been beneficial for some relationships.
It’s totally possible to listen to an audiobook and pay attention, as it is totally possible to read a physical book and *not* pay attention [anyone ever had the “my eyes have gone over this paragraph in the textbook 4 times now and I still haven’t actually read it” moment when studying?], but within at least this demographic, audiobooks get multitasked and physical books don’t, and it’s a little maddening in the book club sometimes, when people missed something fairly central and are thus annoyed at the book for something that the book did mention at least a couple of times, but: it’s still them experiencing at least most of the book.
(one book-club member has been listening to the audiobook *while reading the book visually* for over a year [when it’s possible – not everything has an audiobook] and is a vigorous proponent of this method, saying “if you’re not going to give your full attention to a book, you may as well watch junk TV instead” and… no. There are enough books in the world for us to give our full attention to some, and 1/4 of our attention to others, and that’s fine. The experiences are not equivalent, and our level of knowledge about what’s actually in that book will be, uh, different, but… yeah.)(there is still a place for junk TV, though. Just, if you are somewhat busy and accumulate 10 really good books to read per month, and you only have time to deeply read one book per month, then you may as well lightly-read, or distractedly-read, or sleepily-read, or audiobook-while-exercising read the other nine rather than simply never reading them!)