Do Audiobooks Count as Reading?

    Does listening to an audiobook count as reading?

    The short answer is yes.

    As for the long answer here are two things that helped me unlearn the idea that audiobooks don’t count.

    There is a wonderful, independently owned bookstore I love to haunt.  And when I could ride my bike I would go there several times a week.  I would meet all sorts of people.  One time a gentleman came in who didn’t get to come in often.  He was a trucker and spent most of his time on the road.  He talked about how he loved reading, but didn’t get much time to sit down with a book since he became a trucker.  So he had been using audiobooks so he could listen to the stories while he was driving.

    This was the first time reading by audiobook had ever really been presented to me as a positive thing and not as lazy.  And it made absolute sense.  Why should he have to give up reading and good stories because of his job?  He shouldn’t.  And no one should give him grief for it either.

    I do believe this was the instance that convinced me that audiobooks counted as reading.  But I was still around a lot of toxic people and I knew that they would still have enough of an issue with the idea to cause problems over it.  Honestly, there was a lot of ableism there.  And that is the next topic.

    If you don’t already know, I have dyslexia.  It can get pretty bad.  But I have good days too.  On a particularly bad day I don’t even recognize English letters.  My brain simply will not process them.  Eventually I figured out that I could use Text-to-Speech (TTS) add-ons on my browser and similar functions on my phone to help me out.  And once I got proof of my dyslexia I got access to accessible print libraries like BookShare.  With BookShare there are different options.  Several different options.  Audiobooks, Synchronized TTS (Text-to-Speech synced with the text so it highlights the words that are being read), electronic braille, the ability the change the size, font, and colors (text and background).

    And you know what? It is all reading.  Everyone should have the ability to read, no matter how they do it.  And no one should tell them it doesn’t count.

    It took me a year to read Bram Stoker's “Dracula.”  It didn’t help that the person I was living with had the TV going constantly.  Makes it much harder to read standard print with constant noise.  But when I finally got BookShare and the Synchronized TTS, as well as a quiet place to read.  I managed to finish a book in three days.  It felt amazing.  Suddenly so much more of the world was available.

    So yeah, Audiobooks and accessible books all count as reading.  If you consume a book through one of these means, you read the book.  And if we are talking about books we’ve read in the past, what of those that were read to us as kids.  Isn't it easier and less confusing to  say that you have read the story rather than argue you didn’t actually read it because someone read it to you?  Should we feel like we have to read it physically for it to count.  Isn’t that sort of like a live audiobook.  In some classes in High School we even took turns reading sections.  We still absorbed that information.  Reading is reading.

    Read your books.  Your magazines.  Your articles.  Newspapers.  Whatever method you chose or need.  Read and enjoy.  Life is way too short to try and conform to other people's standards.

Tata,
Lilian