Books Are Books, But…

There are some subjects you should leave alone if you’ve already addressed them. There are some wells to which you should not return, leaving well enough alone. Alas, these are where one’s pet peeves are to be found, and so I must confront Ruben’s suggestion that you can read an audiobook.

To refresh your mind: I’ve previously said that there is no moral value distinction between reading a book versus hearing one. It all “counts”, whatever that might mean. Audiobooks are valid, and people who listen to them are making valid choices. They don’t even need my validation.

However.

Look up any dictionary for read, and you’ll see definitions describing “discovering” information, “interrogating” a record, “understanding” something, or “studying”. Computers even read from databases, networks, and disks, and they don’t use eyes for it.

The dictionary says such things, but not all different usages of the same letters in sequence are therefore synonyms or describing the same activity. That there’s a usage of read that means “understand” doesn’t mean that all uses of read are synonyms for understand, for example. So whether you’ve spent time with a paper book or with a recording of it you can understand it, but only in one case have you actually read it.

Me, previously:

In the case of an audiobook read by multiple parties, you’re essentially experiencing a radio play. No one’s ever argued that if you’ve listened to a radio play you’ve “read” the play. Hell, if you go see a production of Hamlet, you haven’t “read” Hamlet.

While you couldn’t exit a production of Hamlet and proclaim, “I’ve finally read Hamlet!”, it’s entirely possible to so exit and proclaim, “Now that I’ve seen Hamlet, I think that a close reading of the text shows us that…” because that’s an example of “read” taking on a usage to mean “examine” or “understand”.

Me:

Really, it’s much simpler: we read books to children all the time before they can do so for themselves (and sometimes even after), and we don’t say that child has “read” those books. They’ve listened to them, but we don’t somehow think any less of them for doing so.

That last is important because it gets to the heart of what I find distinct about reading, specifically: it’s disintermediated. Ruben wonders if “our visually impaired friends merely feel a book instead of reading it” and of course they don’t. When reading a book it’s up to our own minds to generate intonation, pacing, tone. This is true whether we access the author’s words through our eyes or our fingers.

When we listen to someone else read a book, however, those sorts of qualities are determined and delivered by someone not ourselves. Even in the case of an audiobook read by the author themselves, we’re subject to their intonation, pacing, and tone rather than that summoned by our own mind. Reading and hearing simply are two different things.

So, my peevish pedantry stands: words mean things, and we should use them to mean what they say. What’s important is to destigmatize audiobooks and validate them as books. If we find books important, though, so should we find it important that the words they teach us not be needlessly malleable.