How I like to get my audiobook on

In a piece for The New York Times, Brian Bannon, chief librarian at the New York Public Library, answers a question I imagine many book club members worldwide have asked themselves at one time or another: “Do Audiobooks Count as Reading?”

In case you don’t have a digital subscription to the Times, I’ll highlight some of the more memorable points. Today, 41% of adults don’t believe audiobooks qualify as reading. Yet, as Bannon points out, “learning to read with the eyes starts with decoding, linking letters to sounds and meaning. But once those pathways are built, the brain draws on the same language network to make sense of words, whether they arrive through sight or sound.”

Audiobooks not only allow blind people to become “absorbed in the words, taking in their meaning,” but also assist people with dyslexia, like the author of the article, to “effortlessly absorb ideas and focus in a way I hadn’t before.”

Interestingly, listening to books is on the rise: “Audiobook sales reached about $2.2 billion in the United States last year. At the New York Public Library, audio circulation rose 65 percent in the past five years while circulation for print and e-books stayed flat — a pattern mirrored nationwide. Audio has overtaken e-books in driving growth.”

In my own book club, we 12 readers are never on the same page (groan) when it comes to how we “read” our shared literary journey every month. Although I don’t have any hard stats to back this up, I’d say we’re roughly 40% physical book, 30% e-book, and 30% audiobook. Personally, I’m around 50/50 with the physical copy and e-book (shout-out to the Toronto Public Library for having seemingly every book under the sun and free delivery of physical books to my home branch).

That being said, I do listen to the odd book now and again. In the case of Bono’s Surrender, that actually saved me. When I found myself not fully engrossed in the reading aspect of the story, I switched to the audiobook and ended up finishing it (all 845 hours . . . give or take) quite happily. In another instance, we read David Grann’s The Wager not long ago and a few of my fellow book club members swore by the audiobook, saying there was no chance they would have finished it without the euphonious voice of the man responsible for reading it to them.

On a final note, I liked loved the conclusion to the piece Brian Bannon wrote, as it essentially captures why I started a book club in the first place 16 years ago: “However we read — by eye, by ear or both — it all counts. What matters is that the words get in, the brain makes meaning and the identity of being a reader takes hold. We need more readers, however they get there.”