Why Listening to a Book Is Not the Same as Reading It

I listen to audiobooks when I wouldn’t otherwise be engaging a book—say, at the gym or while walking. That’s certainly an advantage of listening over reading. But I was surprised to find that Willingham didn’t mention what I consider to be the biggest difference between the two mediums: Engagement.

The critical difference, for me, between reading and listening is that reading is something you do, where listening is something that happens to you. Reading is an act of engagement. The words on the page aren’t going to read themselves, which is something they literally do in an audiobook.

t the end of the day, time spent contemplating new ideas and experiencing new worlds is what matters. And if audiobooks open new ideas and worlds for you, then that’s all that counts. Kody Commers