Audiobooks are everywhere. Scroll through Audible, Spotify, Libby, or whatever app your local library uses, and you’ll notice that audiobooks truly are everywhere. Once considered a niche product reserved for a select group of readers or accessibility needs, audiobooks are now becoming their own industry, one that shapes the way we experience literature. In 2024 alone, Deloitte’s Center for Technology reports a 15% increase in audiobook listenership worldwide. The Audio Publishers Association (APA) indicates the audiobook market in the U.S. grew by nearly 10%, to approximately $2 billion in 2023.
With this growth has come a complicated and heated debate. The question isn’t whether people are listening to books—that much is evident. The question now is, does listening to books on audio count as reading? On TikTok, Reddit, and even in some in-person settings, readers square off over whether an audiobook can sit on the same metaphorical shelf as a physical or even e-book.
Make no mistake, people do care about the distinction. For many, the legitimacy of their reading identity is on the line. If you count audiobooks toward your yearly Goodreads or StoryGraph challenge, are you cheating if you say you’ve read a book when you listened to it? Are you lying?
The tension, much like other current popular debates about romance covers and BookTok, isn’t really about the medium itself. It’s about perception, legitimacy, and what it means to be a reader in 2025.
Audiobooks in and of themselves are not new. Thomas Edison experimented with recording novels onto phonographs in the 1870s. By the mid-20th century, talking books were being used to make literature more accessible to the blind in place of simply using braille. What is new is the cultural mainstreaming of listening to “talking books.” According to Michele Cobb from the APA, there have been significant changes in audiobook consumption. Especially from younger people, ages 13-24, who have demonstrated a 45% increase in total audio time.
These numbers prove that audiobooks are normalized. It also sharpens the question. If half the time you’re reading a book, your eyes are never on the page, does the activity even have any meaning? The same cultural weight?
The stigma against audiobooks hides behind the veneer of tradition. Reading has been associated with effort, discipline, and a clear intellectual labor. Tired eyes, turning pages of heavy tomes. Listening, by contrast, feels passive.
The same claims can even be extended to reading on a Kindle, Kobo or other e-reading device. Sure, it’s not exactly the same medium. The pages aren’t real, the books not as heavy. But your eyes still do most of the work. But, when it comes to the shift from eye to ear, the legitimacy of reading is suddenly on trial.
Neuroscientific research shows that listening and reading engage the brain in shockingly similar ways. A 2019 study at UC Berkeley found that listening to an audiobook and reading the same text lit up nearly identical regions of the brain responsible for comprehension, visualization, and emotional response. In other words, whether you’re reading words with your eyes, feeling braille with your fingers, or listening to voices in your ears, your brain is processing a story.
Of course, the experience isn’t all the same. The way author Hank Green puts it in his video titled “Are audiobooks worse?”, reading and listening are two separate experiences. The narrator of an audiobook makes decisions for us before any of the information enters our minds. Audiobooks add intonation, pacing, and—with the recent rise in full cast audio productions—a performance. Printed text allows for skimming, annotation, and flipping back through pages. Just because they’re different doesn’t mean one is better and the other worse. In his video titled “Do Audiobooks Count As Reading?” author John Green states that “there are all kinds of complexities and nuances to audiobooks that don’t translate to print and vice versa.”
Audiobooks have a perception problem tied to visibility. When you read a hardcover or paperback on a bus or plane everyone can see. There’s a subconscious shift in the way people might view you. You’re a reader. You’re intelligent.
With audiobooks, this perception is no longer there. Headphones don’t tell a story. No one can tell you’re reading when your AirPods are in. This invisibility feeds into the stereotype that audiobooks are less valuable and not “real” reading. But, just because they are less detectable to others doesn’t mean audiobooks aren’t useful. Reading in public has always been—more so now than before—performative to some degree. It’s a way to project your identity and interests. Without the material object, we start doubting the legitimacy of our personalities. Are we even readers?
The “audiobooks aren’t reading” argument also ignores equity. For people with dyslexia, ADHD, vision impairment, or chronic illness, audiobooks aren’t just an alternative to reading—they are reading. To deny their legitimacy is to exclude entire communities from identifying as readers.
It’s worth asking why we, as a society, are still clinging so tightly to such rigid definitions of reading. Isn’t the point of reading to transmit stories, ideas, and emotions regardless of the avenue?
Publishers are already embracing the increase in audio readership. Audible is known for their exclusives—be it an exclusive cast rendition of a classic or an altogether original story. Spotify is making audiobooks accessible by merging an established music platform with popular audiobooks. If retailers are able to expand their definition of readers, why are actual readers gatekeeping what it means to read?
Dismissing audiobooks as not real reading is overlooking the point of reading entirely. Books are not solely for entertainment. They are also not solely for strengthening your mind or your ability to comprehend stories and emotions. Books are designed to be political. They have deeper messaging that is found in the subtext, between the lines that are both read and heard.
If reading is about engagement, empathy, and imagination, then audiobooks more than certainly count as reading. They are not a shortcut. They are another—completely and equally valid—way to experience books. A way rooted in both tradition and modernity. One that our ancestors are most certainly glad to see we still carry on to this day.
For more on the topic, check out PRR blog by writer Allisone Doerner on Audiobooks v. Reading Aloud where she talks about the differences between listening to audio and reading books aloud. Other videos to check out on the topic can be found here by Youtuber Merphy Napier and here by Dr Jack Close. In addition to these ones on the more standard debate, this video essay from silver fox titled “the decline in literacy & rise in ai” is also interesting when looking at how AI models and text to speech accessibility features might be impacting reading via audio.
Vanshikha Vij, Pine Reads Review Writer