Listening vs Reading

Originally posted by FMF
Are there any intellectual, emotional or psychological differences between the experience and outcomes of reading a book and listening to it as an audio book?

There are differences for sure. My son Kevin has a job that gives him free time in an office and they don't want him playing on the computer so he downloads audio books to his laptop and listens to them.

He has listened to hundreds of books that way in the last couple of years. The thing about audio books is they can use actors and music to make the experience more movie like so you may remember them later.

Myself I read paper. My wife on the other hand, loves the Kindle. She has found a couple of problems with the kindle style book. One is you have a lot of trouble backtracking to a previous page say 100 pages back there is the beginning of a sub-plot or a name you want to reference. In paper books that is simple, just thumb back to your reference page.

In a kindle, it is a time consuming process, there is no way to go to an exact page since the pagination is different with a kindle, it is listed in % of the page read, say you are at 90% and you want to go to 3.4%, it is not easy to find the exact previous page.

There is another problem with her kindle, in fact she has had 3 now, 2 of them have screwed up one way or another and had to be replaced.

The Kindle people say there is a problem in the way the books are transcribed to a digital media and when you hit the button for the next page, sometimes it goes forward ten pages or back ten or 6 or some other #. Kindle people blame the book itself rather than accepting blame for some kind of engineering fault.

Then there is the issue of battery life. It is not long enough to read a whole book. You pretty much have to have the thing plugged in and forget the battery unless you have some other charging technique, like in a car, a cigarette lighter charger, or maybe some kind of solar energy charger at the beach or whatnot.

Originally posted by FMF
Are there any intellectual, emotional or psychological differences between the experience and outcomes of reading a book and listening to it as an audio book?

I like reading better, took an audio book on a long flight, closed my eyes and listened to whole thing. Didn't enjoy it nearly as much as reading it.
Kelly

Originally posted by FMF
Are there any intellectual, emotional or psychological differences between the experience and outcomes of reading a book and listening to it as an audio book?

One can read at one's own pace. It's faster for a good reader to read than listen. Also you can flip around through the book much more easily than you can do the same with audio.

However you don't get the information from a book that you get from tone of voice and rate of speech.

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
One can read at one's own pace. It's faster for a good reader to read than listen. Also you can flip around through the book much more easily than you can do the same with audio.

However you don't get the information from a book that you get from tone of voice and rate of speech.

Certainly you can read at your own pace, and reread sections very easily if you didn't get it the first time. Likewise flipping through the book lets you make connections and re-inforce your comprehension. I would also say that if the book is well written, you should be able to get all the nuances of intonation etc through the punctuation and prose. With an audiobook, unless the reader is also the author, you are just going to get someone elses verbal interpretation of the words.

So for most cases, reading is better for comprehension than listening imho.

The one case I can think of where listening is better is when you can't read: I have listened to books while driving. I'm sure I wouldn't be typing this today if I had read them!

--- Penguin.