Do audiobooks count as reading?

Financial Times – [unpaywalled]  We’re in the midst of a listening revolution — and a new debate over text versus voice – “The numbers are eloquent. In the US, 52 per cent of adults have listened to an audiobook, and revenue from the audiobook market jumped to $2bn in 2023, according to a 2024 consumer survey released by the Audio Publishers Association. The UK audiobook market crossed £1bn in 2023, according to industry magazine The Bookseller, and from Audible to Downpour, Kobo and more recently, Spotify, audiobook sites have become as necessary to many readers as physical bookstores. As Karl Berglund, author and assistant professor in literature at Sweden’s Uppsala University, writes in his book Reading Audio Readers, “Though audiobook streams are skyrocketing, print book sales are not declining. What appears to be happening is that people are expanding how they make use of literature, what reading is and can be.” Unsurprisingly, there’s an age gap — many surveys show that children like, respond to and learn vocabulary from audiobooks, while 51 per cent of frequent listeners are between the ages of 18 and 44. Older readers might remain hidebound in their insistence that a book means a physical (or digital) book, but browsing forums, I felt that most readers in their twenties and thirties were format-agnostic: the story and the narration matters to them far more than any battle over text versus voice.”