paultimate15Read More
Audiobooks! I went from reading 0 books in 2024 to 72 books in 2025. I listen on walks, commutes, and luckily have a job where I can listen at work.
good for you, but there is something important to mention. LISTENING is not reading, they are literally two different words for two different activities and there is a reason for that.
I guess it depends on what you’re trying to achieve with reading. I want to experience a good story, or maybe learn something. Audiobooks do the job just fine, maybe better than text for me. If you think there’s inherent value in consuming text, then I can respect that, but it doesn’t discount the tremendous amount of value that audiobooks have in many people’s lives.
reading is active process, contrary to listening, which is quite passive one. you really have to focus on reading and it is unlikely for you to be reading and suddenly realize you are actually not reading and you don’t know what happened for the last 3 pages.
if the audio books work for you, great, but listening and reading are still two different words for a reason.
Maybe for you, but I regularly continue ‘reading’ with my eyes scanning each line, sometimes for paragraphs at a time, before I realise I didn’t take in any words and was still thinking about what happened previously.
I agree one requires the reader to actively continue processing the story and the other doesn’t, but there are clear and direct parallels in attention, comprehension, enjoyment and benefits between audio books and visual books.
Just because one requires you to move your eyes and one doesn’t, doesn’t mean they are substantively different in mental experience. Arguing so serves to split apart people who experienced the same story or non-fiction on grounds of which sense they used to experience it, when in reality it is the semantics of what they experienced and how it affects them that matters when we ask if you’ve ‘read’ something.
Just because one requires you to move your eyes and one doesn’t, doesn’t mean they are substantively different in mental experience.
of course it does and you don’t have to take my word for it: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3842750/
even the method itself matters. and on top of that, one lets you multitask and that is situation where it is MUCH easier to lose a focus. you can’t read a book while cooking, doing laundry, or driving. you can do that with audio books.
you continue to do what is comfortable for you, i am not taking any experience from you, just don’t call listening reading and don’t call apple orange. it confuses people and there is absolutely no benefit to doing so 🤷♂️
The way we encounter reading material influences how frequently we mind wander
We examined whether different encounters of reading material influence the likelihood of mind wandering, memory for the material, and the ratings of interest in the material. In a within-subjects design participants experienced three different ...
it is unlikely for you to be reading and suddenly realize you are actually not reading and you don’t know what happened for the last 3 pages.
Really? This is an unlikely occurrence to you? This is my fucking process for reading a book. Exactly to a T.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3842750/
that may very well be, but you are not in a majority on this. and it is still no reason to use words that actually mean something different then you are describing. there is absolutely no upside to calling apple strawberry, when it is, in fact, an apple, it will just confuse your audience.
The way we encounter reading material influences how frequently we mind wander
We examined whether different encounters of reading material influence the likelihood of mind wandering, memory for the material, and the ratings of interest in the material. In a within-subjects design participants experienced three different ...
You just described what happened basically every time I opened the two towers in high school. I powered through and loved it but yeah I routinely had to reread pages