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In 2005, near the beginning of the MP3 audio book craze, the New York Times charmingly detailed the listening habits of New York authors, who dabbled in Dostoyevsky as they strolled around with their dachshunds:
“David Lipsky, another New York writer and frequent dog walker, said he often ‘shuffles’ music on his iPod, and has similarly come to enjoy jumping among chapters of, say, James Joyce, Martin Amis and Al Franken as he circles the block.”
Now, 37 percent of people say they’ve listened to an audio book, and the medium continues to become an important substitute for old-fashioned reading. Thanks in part to the ubiquity of iPods other gadgets, audio books remain popular despite turmoil in the publishing industry - experiencing a modest growth in sales in past years.
But do all the myriad benefits that books provide - intellectual enrichment, emotional fulfillment, entertainment - really transmit just as well through sound?
Opinions among book lovers differ as to what it means to read "Ulysses" through ear buds on the drive to work. On the book Web site Goodreads, literature buffs both gush (“I love audio books for the times when I have brain power available but can't hold a book”) and disparage the practice (“I can't really listen to audio books. I don't think I retain as much that way, plus I get distracted with other things.”) The ever-efficient readers of the Marginal Revolution blog plugged audio books’ utility as an accompaniment to exercise -- but find them less effective for longer, more involved tomes.
So on an intellectual level, is listening to a book really just as good as reading it?
Pretty much, but it depends on the type of book. Studies on electronic media consumption are still relatively limited, and the audio book genre has been “woefully unaddressed by the academic community in general,” wrote philosophy professor William Irwin in a 2009 essay.
However, even research that predates CDs suggests that reading and listening are strikingly similar cognitive processes. For example, 1985 study found listening comprehension correlated strongly with reading comprehension - suggesting that those who read books well would listen to them well, also. In a 1977 study, college students who listened to a short story were able to summarize it with equal accuracy as those who read it.
“The way this is usually interpreted is that once you are good at decoding letters into sound, which most of us are by the time we're in 5th or 6th grade, the comprehension is the same whether it's spoken or written,” explained University of Virginia psychology professor Dan Willingham.
What’s more, Willingham says there isn’t much individual variance in the way people absorb information (it’s an idea he touched on during a recent NPR interview, which debunked the myth of so-called “learning styles.”) Those who prefer one medium or the other simply like the feel of a physical book or the spoken kind.
“Some people say, ‘podcasts are O.K., but I like the feel of the magazine in my hands,’ - they have pleasant associations with curling up with something,” he said, not an actual talent for processing one versus the other.
Of course, audio books are often used in different settings than traditional books are, which can also impact the way we remember what we read. People who say they can’t concentrate on an audio book as well as a paper one are likely overlooking the fact that we are more likely to multitask while listening to audio books than while reading regular books. (There’s also the simple flaw of attribution bias. If someone listens to an audio book and later forgets key plot points, for example, they might ascribe the forgetting to it being an audio book rather than their overall poor memory.)
The type of book can also influence how well the information gets absorbed. When the material is difficult, for example, physical reading provides an advantage because the individual can re-read and look to surrounding words for context clues, said University of Memphis professor Arthur Graesser, who studies learning and cognition. In fact, he points out that the studies finding a high correlation between listening and reading comprehension might have had different results had they used complex texts rather than easy ones.And yet in some cases, listening offers major advantages over reading, even with material as tough to parse as Shakespeare. That’s because an audio book pre-determines an aspect of language called prosody, or the musicality of words. Prosody is how we known that someone is being self-reflective when they ask aloud if they left the gas on (or when Hamlet asks whether “to be or not to be”).
“Someone who knows the meaning can convey a lot through prosody,” Willingham said. “If you're listening to a poem, the prosody might help you.”
Moreover, we are more likely to stick with a book that we’re listening to than one we’re reading, Graesser said, which would also improve our chances of retaining what’s in it.
“The half-life for listening is much longer than for reading,” he said, because we are pre-conditioned to listen to an entire conversation out of politeness. Generally, people keep listening until there is a pause in an idea, but (especially in today’s information-overload age), we stop reading at the slightest suggestion that something more interesting might be going on elsewhere else.
Still with me?
We may never know whether we read better through our eyes or ears, however, because even a perfect experiment wouldn’t capture the reality of modern life. Regardless of which method sticks more firmly in the brain, reading is still ultimately a more fickle activity in the Internet age, where a billion other e-mails and blogs vie for our attentions.
“We live in a world where the reader has a lot of choices,” Graesser said. “When you look at reading versus listening, giving up trying to read a piece trumps a lot of the other variables.”
