Recently I was in a conversation with an author who was saying she had a friend who didn’t read, but instead listened to audiobooks because the friend had a long drive to commute to work each day and this was the only free time for “reading”. The author felt that this was, in some way, not really reading a book and didn’t “count” or mean her friend had actually read it. She expressed the feeling that it felt a little bit like cheating because it wasn’t as if the friend were reading the book. I should note that she wasn’t trying to be punitive or deliberately exclusionary in her thought pattern, and in fact she said she couldn’t even put into words the exact reason for it, but this was simply a gut feeling she had.
I hadn’t given much thought on my own views on this, until our conversation, but once I did, I realized that I add the audiobooks I’ve listened to, to my Goodreads account just as if I’d read them. I don’t separate out in my head that I’ve read 300 books in a year, but also listened to ten. Instead, to me it’s 310 books read. I argued to the author that people listening to audiobooks are absorbing the exact same content as someone reading the words themselves (assuming they’re not listening to an abridged version) and that the auditory nature of taking in the words doesn’t make it any less impactful than if they’d read them. I also pointed out that there are a number of people for whom audiobooks are the only form of reading, for any number of reasons (vision disabilities, inability to hold books/turn pages, lack of time, as in her friend’s case, or many other reasons–for instance my mother-in-law gets severe vertigo trying to read, so can only use audiobooks) and I would never take away from them the label of “reader” simply because they’re not reading it themselves.
On the other hand, I recognize that if we argue semantics, the word reader does have a very specific definition of “one who reads” with reads being defined as “to look at and understand words” but in the argument of semantics, I’d also say that our visceral understanding of readers is often much greater than just the limiting definition. I think, if you’re consuming a book, whether by audiobook, by reading, or by having it read to you via a digital device/computer, then you’re a reader, even if you’re interacting with the book differently. I’d argue that even those of us who read visually a book all still interact differently with it.
But you tell us: is someone who listens to audiobooks a “reader”. Can you say you’ve “read” a book if you listened to the audiobook version?