This article was published on The Idealist website, 09/27/18.
Even for people who passionately love to read, it can be difficult to find the time and opportunity for their favorite hobby. In such a situation, many rely on audiobooks, a convenient alternative to old-fashioned reading. You can easily listen to the latest bestseller while traveling or cleaning the house.
But is listening to audiobooks the same as reading?
“I was a fan of audiobooks, but I always saw them as cheating,” says Beth Rogowski, a professor at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania.
In 2021, Rogowski proposed conducting a study on this issue. In the study, one group listened to parts of Irresistible, a non-fiction book about World War II by Laura Hillenbrand, while the other group read the same parts using an e-reader. The third group read and listened at the same time. Subsequently, all subjects answered a series of questions on a questionnaire that was designed to determine how well they had learned the material. “We found no significant differences in perception between reading, listening, or reading and listening at the same time,” says Rogowski.
Plus for audiobooks? May be. But Rogowski's study used e-books rather than traditional printed ones, and some evidence suggests that reading on a screen reduces comprehension and understanding compared to reading printed text. So it's possible that if the study had included traditional books, conservatives might have come out ahead.
If you are wondering why printed books can be better than e-books, then it is worth paying attention to an interesting feature: it is difficult for a person to assess where exactly he is in an e-book. “When you're reading a story, the sequence of events is important, and knowing where you are in the book helps you line it up,” says Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of Growing Up Kids Who Read. While e-readers are guided by percentage of volume read, this does not seem to have the same narrative-orienting effect as reading a traditional book.
The fact that printed text is tied to a specific location on the page also appears to help people remember it better than on-screen text, according to more detailed studies of the spatial attributes of traditional print media. All of this may be relevant to discussions about audiobooks and books in general because, like digital screens, audiobooks prevent users from using the spatial cues they use when reading printed text.
Why is listening to audiobooks even better than reading?
Reason No. 5. Children's mode
Among all the benefits of Storytel, there is one more very important one - for parents.
In all subscription options, you can enable Children's mode, which has a number of tangible advantages. Firstly, you don’t need to create a separate account for this - Children’s mode is connected within the adult’s account. To do this, just install the Storytel application on your child’s device, log in to your account and activate this function. Secondly, the activation itself occurs only using a PIN code, so the child will not be able to turn this function on or off independently. Thirdly, the application will only display content that is intended for listeners under 12 years of age. Last (and probably most convenient): Kids Mode allows you and your child to listen to books independently of each other. Separate bookshelves appear on gadgets, and on a child’s device, book recommendations will correspond to his listening history. Storytel has a separate section dedicated exclusively to children's content, both in Russian and English. The collection has literally everything: Swedish classics, for example, “Baby and Carlson” and “Pippi Longstocking”, English, “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass”, and, of course, Russian - “The Cluttering Fly”, “ The Wizard of the Emerald City", "Hedgehog in the Fog". In English you can find all parts of “Harry Potter” and “The Chronicles of Narnia”. And this is only a small part of all available audiobooks - they will definitely keep your child occupied and captivated.
Reason No. 6. Audiobooks and lectures are read by their authors
Storytel does everything so that the user can gain a new experience, and “reading” turns into a favorite pastime. It’s one thing to listen to a book, but it’s another thing entirely to listen to a book narrated by the author himself. Maximum immersion! The Storytel service already has a unique selection of similar works. For example, you can listen to Nikolai Svanidze’s book “The Age of the Brave,” where the journalist talks about the time of the Decembrists and the first political opposition in Russia. Or the autobiography of the famous journalist and first editor-in-chief of Vogue Alena Doletskaya “Not life, but a fairy tale.” The writer not only reads from the book, but also improvises in places. The library also has lectures on various topics. Among them is “How to teach the brain to learn” from St. Petersburg State University professor, doctor of philology and biology, the face of modern science in St. Petersburg Tatyana Chernigovskaya, who believes that our future is impossible without knowledge about the brain. By the way, this is the most popular lecture in this collection.
How do people who read and listen to information remember: research results
It sounds like it's easier to understand a book by listening than by reading, but that's not always the case. A study was conducted to compare how well students learned a science subject from a 22-minute audio lesson and a printed article. The two groups of students were given the same amount of time.
Despite this, after 2 days those reading the lesson scored 81%
in assessing the knowledge gained, and
listeners
of the audio file -
only 59%.
Why did it happen? Please note that the science subject was difficult and the goal was learning, not fun
(both factors influence how we read).
When we focus, we slow down. Students could re-read the printed article, stop, and reflect on what they read.
It is emphasized that printed information helps the reader in the reading process through structural division into paragraphs, headings, quotations, etc.
Which audiobooks to start with
Below I recommend several audiobooks that are performed very, very well. Choose authors and genres to suit your taste.
Max Fry - Labyrinths Echo
Read by Denis Verovoy
Very pleasant tales about friendship, magic and the fight against dark masters. The performer Denis Verovoy is simply wonderful! "You never know where you'll get lucky" 
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - It's hard to be a god
Read by Leonid Yarmolnik 3h 48m
Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
Performers: Vladislav Vetrov, Armen Dzhigarkhanyan, Alexander Filipenko, Tatyana Shpagina and others 3h 45m
This is no longer just an audiobook, it's an audio play. Many performers read a book based on their roles. The effect of complete immersion occurs. A book about space, extraterrestrial intelligence, human and non-human relationships. If you listen in the dark and silence, it can become very unsettling.
Boris Akunin - The Adventures of Erast Fandorin
The performers are different. The correct ones are where there is a black cover and the Soyuz publishing house.
The coolest ones are “Azazel”, “State Councilor”, “Coronation, or the Last of the Novels” and “The Diamond Chariot”. It’s better to start with “Azazel”, and then the order becomes less important.
Victor Pelevin - Chapaev and Emptiness
Read by Alexander Sklyar
The first Zen Buddhist novel. Pelevin's best. Excellent performance.
Yulian Semyonov - Seventeen moments of spring
Read by Alexander Klyukvin (same voice!)
They perform a song at the beginning - don’t be alarmed, the rest will only be an audiobook.
Minuses
Requires the ability to maintain attention for a long time. For me it’s easy and fun, but for others it’s torture. Some people are unlucky)
Information is absorbed worse. This is critical for complex professional literature.
You can watch movies and TV series together; this usually doesn’t work with audiobooks. In this way they are more like books.
There are books that last 6, 8 and even 12 hours. You can’t listen to this in one go, and they don’t give them convenient 40-minute episodes.
Bad reading kills all the fun. There are not many well-performed audiobooks. There are very few well-executed audiobooks.
Psychologists, doctors and scientists about the benefits of audiobooks for children
Now let’s listen to what scientists, psychologists and doctors say about the benefits and harms of audiobooks for children. Opinions here are also very different. Some argue that audiobooks are modern and cannot cause any harm to children, others claim that they are not so much useful as harmful. Let's start with the benefits of listening to an audiobook as a child.
When a baby listens to audiobooks, his memory develops. After listening to an audio tale, the child will most likely want to share what he heard and remembered with people close to him: mom, dad, grandparents, older brothers or sisters. Thus, the baby trains and develops his memory. In addition, by retelling what he heard, the child develops his speech.
Typically, children's audio books are narrated by professional actors. Listening to professional voice acting, the child involuntarily imitates the actor’s intonations and learns the correct pronunciation of words and phrases. In addition, professionally voiced audiobooks help children begin to develop primary artistic abilities and communication skills. Such data and such skill can be very useful in later life. Many audio fairy tales feature classical music, by listening to which the child develops musicality and high aesthetic taste.
Since children spend a lot of time studying, as well as in front of the computer and TV, their eyes get tired. As a result, vision may deteriorate. And when a child listens to an audiobook, his eyes rest. In addition, by listening to fairy tales and stories in audio versions, children will be less likely to watch television programs that are harmful to the child’s psyche.
Children's audio fairy tales play a big role in cases where parents and their child are traveling on public transport, standing in line, in some public institution, etc. It often happens that in such cases the baby gets tired and begins to be capricious. In this case, it is not always possible to entertain a child with an ordinary book. A player with headphones is more useful here (so as not to disturb those nearby). Practice shows that an audiobook is much more successful in helping to calm a child.
Let's sum it up
This way, you are not lying if you say you read a book but actually listened to it. just have a different experience.
And besides, different books offer different ways of reading.
As the audio format becomes more popular, authors are writing works specifically designed for listening.
We will gain a rich experience from reading and listening to books if we understand the differences between these two formats. The point is not which is better to replace which, but how to use both formats to our personal advantage, and hear what the authors want to tell us.
Why won't audiobooks replace print?
Despite the advantage of printed texts, audiobooks are becoming increasingly common. As students do this, they gain experience in understanding the information and can improve. Publishers, in turn, can and will develop ways to make the audio format easier to understand.
Audiobooks will never replace print because we use them differently and for different purposes.
Thus, 81% of audiobook listeners say that they like to do other things while listening to books: drive a car, exercise, wash the car, etc.
But since the human mind is not designed to multitask, we only get the gist of the book but lose the subtleties.
However, we cannot clean the floor while we are reading a printed book. Printing helps you linger on words and ideas. Audiobooks help out when you don't have time to sit down and concentrate on a book.
Photo: medium.com
Advantages of a paper book
No matter how widespread audiobooks become, they will not replace printed publications. This is explained by the fact that it takes more time to absorb information on a digital medium than conventional reading. The voice of the person acting is not always audible, and sketches and diagrams cannot be reproduced when recording audiobooks.
Important! Information received through a digital medium is perceived worse, since the listener's attention is directed to several things at the same time.
According to researchers, listening to an audiobook reduces interest in the material. The information received remains unattended because there is no eye contact with the text. Interestingly, the participants did not perform any other tasks during the experiment. They listened carefully to the text, but were still distracted. And the attention of those who did other work and turned on digital audiobooks scattered even more.
However, information is remembered even worse if viewed on video. Experts have found that when listening to material, it penetrates the brain more than when playing it on a monitor. This is proven by the listener's increased heart rate, electrical activity of the skin and increased temperature.
pros
Good audiobooks create more vivid images and stronger emotions in my head than a good movie. Perhaps this is because the images in your head are more reliable than the images on the screen. In movies, actors play roles, and I can rarely completely disengage from their performance. And here there is only a good story and an interesting narrator.
Your eyes don't get tired of paper or screen. And so I look at the luminous points all day long. An hour without screens is a luxury.
Can be combined with other activities that do not require the brain. Walking, traveling, household chores, cooking.
Audiobooks are soothing. I stopped getting annoyed with people on the subway and on the roads when I became heavily addicted to audiobooks.
I used to read books from my phone before going to bed. But a glowing screen doesn't help the brain relax. The proximity of Facebook also did not contribute to falling asleep. And I leave the phone with the audiobook to charge and broadcast at the other end of the room. When I fall asleep, the audiobook soon pauses itself using the iTired program. It's comfortable.
