Did you actually read the book when you heard it?

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When I complained to a friend a few weeks ago that I wouldn’t have had the time to read as much as I wanted in 2025, he responded with a true cultural person comment: “So? I read at least four books a week myself.”

Wow. Enough, because my friend is well-read and interested in literature, but even for a culture-loving person, 200 books a year sounded incredible – especially considering that he has a full-time job, other hobbies and children.

“Most impressive,” I said, “What’s your secret?”

“No secrets, my friend. I only listen to them on the way to and from work, when I’m doing the dishes, standing in the laundry room and cooking. That takes up a lot of time.”

Aha, he’s talking about audio books, I thought, these devilish inventions. What audacity!

“You, reading and listening to audiobooks are not the same thing,” I remarked. “It’s like riding an escalator and claiming to have walked between floors.”

My statement was based on personal experience. I can easily admit that I am not an audiobook person. I usually get lost listening to them. I find it awkward to rewind if I miss a sentence. I lack the ability to underline and write notes in the margins, and I can’t stop and process ideas when the recording continues.

But there’s something beyond that – I feel like the information doesn’t really stick. It is a passive form of media consumption, not unlike binge-watching television. “Sound is an inferior format for literature,” I concluded sourly, “unworthy of comparison with text.”

But afterwards a nagging feeling – what if I had been wrong? What if information was absorbed acoustically as well as visually? Maybe I’m part of a minority that prefers text to sound?

I came across two interesting things in the scientific literature. One was that in normal reading, 10-25 percent of eye movements are in the opposite direction to the text – that is, the eyes go back to check that you have read correctly, understood the meaning, interpreted correctly based on the new context, and so on. The phenomenon of “double control” increases when it comes to more difficult content.

Second, research has shown that when reading printed text, the brain creates a spatial map of the locations where key words, sentences, and paragraphs are found (e.g., “top left of a page at the end of chapter one”). These anchor points then help the brain create a coherent narrative. In audio format, this spatial map is not formed and therefore it may be more difficult to orient yourself in longer material.

But one thing surprised me in my literature review: there are surprisingly few studies that have examined how well information is recorded when delivered as audio versus text. For material of larger size, such as an entire book, there are no studies at all.

For shorter texts, there are some reasons why it is easier to remember the information after reading it than hearing it. This was observed, for example, in a thesis of the teacher training course at Halmstad University. When a group of 150 high school students were read an English short story in either text or audio form, it was found that classical reading provided the best comprehension. However, the students achieved the best effect when they combined reading and listening, which suggests that the formats can be advantageously combined in pedagogy.

So can it be said that audio books are demonstrably inferior to printed books? No. There is a lack of solid evidence to draw convincing conclusions about, for example, the effect of format on reading comprehension. But I think there is reason to believe that listening and reading are not the same thing. For particularly high-quality literature, nonfiction, and other cognitively demanding texts that benefit from rereading and spatial mapping, I can’t imagine an even distribution of sound.

So be sure to check out your audio books. But don’t claim you’ve read them.