Should Audiobooks "Count"?

Reading has often been a solitary pastime or hobby, but the internet has made it easy to reach beyond local book clubs and connect with fellow fans and readers. We love our books! We love the characters! We swoon over the love interest and are aghast at the villain's evil. Having other readers to swoon with has just made reading that more appealing. 

But then we have the quibbles about what counts as reading. 

Literacy rates are a frequent topic of discussion in both education circles and on the national stage. I don't think we've ever been not worried about them. In this case, though, I'm not going to be talking about the process of teaching eye reading to primary school children. In the first four or five years of school, teaching the alphabet, word recognition, decoding, and (hopefully) the patterns of our language are a vital part of education. 

Today, I'm talking about adults who are reading for pleasure, recreation, or information. By the time people are adults, most of us have excellent decoding and word recognition skills. Once students are in upper middle school and high school, reading class is focused on understanding and analyzing stories. That's what we do as adults, even if the sum of our analysis is, "I like this," and "I don't like that."

In that discussion, whether we're asking if audiobooks should count toward yearly or monthly reading goals, whether it counts as reading for our book club, or just counts as reading at all, the answer is yes, and that's not just based on feelings and vibes. 

We have brain scans. 

This article in Medical News Today describes how scientists at the University of California, Berkley, studied active brain scans of people as they eye-read or ear-read, and found that the brain activity was nearly identical. The article links the study in the Journal of Neuroscience, for anyone who wants the original source. 

When we're talking about comprehension, analysis, and plain old enjoyment, the way we read the story doesn't matter to our brains. Ear-reading an audiobook stimulates the same activity as eye-reading a hard copy or ebook. It's also a common disability aid. For people who, like my father, are visually impaired, audiobooks keep reading accessible. For people like my mother and two of my children, who are dyslexic, audiobooks level the playing field, so reading material isn't a barrier between them and information or enjoyment. For younger students, who might still be learning the mechanics of reading that I mentioned earlier, listening to the audiobook while eye-reading along is one of the best ways to increase word recognition and general fluency. Audiobooks have become a valuable tool in literacy education and continuing adult literacy. 

If you prefer audiobooks, or you need them to access literature, there's no reason to feel like your choice is "less than" or that you "aren't a real reader". There's no excuse for people sneering at audiobook reading. Audiobooks are books, and ear-reading is reading.