I am so SICK AND TIRED of seeing this being flung around book Twitter. I am SICK AND TIRED of elitism surrounding reading.

People who say that audiobooks don’t get as reading are elitist, ableist and just idiots. Yes, ok, when I say I’m reading a book in audiobook format, I do say that I’m listening to an audiobook, but it’s still reading. An audiobook is when a person is reading out loud from a book, like… they’re reading the EXACT SAME WORDS that are on the pages in front of them. They could be reading the book out loud for a radio show/podcast, or they could be reading it for a service like Audible or Scribd.

IT COUNTS AS READING.

I’ve also seen people say that ‘well… you can’t read literary criticism or philosophy books such as Karl Marx or Simone de Beauvoir on audiobook’. Why? Why can’t you? What’s stopping someone from doing that? Nothing. How do you think people who have sight problems read? They can use braille, or they read books via the audiobook service, which means YES, they can also read Marx or de Beauvoir! Oh, the horror! People educating themselves. It just comes back around to the elitist behaviour that is surrounding the whole concept of audiobooks.

People are also stating that when using audiobooks, you can space out listening to them and so you’re not really taking the story in. And I agree… To a certain extent. If I space out when listening to audiobooks, I just use the rewind service that’s available on Audible. You can skip 30 seconds backwards, I find this so handy. If I missed a bit because my parents kept talking to me, I just use the 30 seconds button to skip back to the bit that I was at before they came barging in. But it’s the same with physical books as well. I will also tend to space out when reading physical books, because I don’t have a very big attention span. So like many people do, if I think that I’ve been skimming pages, I will go back and read them properly… Just like you can do on an audiobook.

Audiobooks have helped me tackle my TBR so much. I listen to them in the car, when I’m doing chores, when I’m just lying on my bed doing nothing, when I’m cooking tea, when I’m blogging, I even use them to make me go to sleep, as I find that listening to the narrator read the story aloud comforts me and sends me to sleep. I have a lot of trouble getting to sleep as I suffer from chronic insomnia. But I have found (as I’ve started listening to audiobooks at night), that they REALLY help me relax and get to sleep.

I know that this has been a discussion that everyone seems to be having lately, and I know that it might get boring for you guys to keep seeing these types of posts everywhere, but I just wanted to share my thoughts on the topic.

Ok, so discussion over. This was a bit of an impromptu post for me, but I really did just want to get a few things off of my chest about this whole issue (that shouldn’t be an issue, but it is for some reason).

What do you think about audiobooks? Do you class listening to them as reading? Let me know in the comments below.

Until next time…