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dniepr t1_j0ugjaq wrote

I'm perplexed. I always felt that reading and listening to audiobooks were completely different activities, I couldn't in any way group them together. Why do you?

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shnibbershnab t1_j0upin2 wrote

Most people considering listening to audiobooks akin to reading

I’d ask “why don’t you”?

You’re still ingesting the content word for word.

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nameisntfranco t1_j0v2d25 wrote

I second this. Why do you not consider it the same thing? What do you get from reading a book that I don’t get from listening to it?

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Zikoris t1_j0v4mmx wrote

I mean, listening and reading are just objectively two different things. If you decide they're the same, you immediately run into all sort of logistical impossibilities. If listening is reading, a two year old who has not learned to read yet can now somehow read. So can an illiterate person, and heck, maybe even a dog if you made a simple enough audiobook that consisted of mainly words dogs commonly know.

If your definition of reading means 1. an illiterate person can read, 2. a two year old who has not started school yet can read, and 3. a dog can read, your definition is just obviously wrong.

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dniepr t1_j0vg0hu wrote

But reading is not "ingesting content" and that's it; it involves knowing how to write, graphic indicators, it engages the brain in the guessing game that is being more or less aware of the typical collocations associated to a given word, punctuation's value... for example, there are some texts that have meaning exclusively in the written medium (like the poems typed in bizarre shapes from last century), and vice versa. Very simply, you cannot say that reading a play is the same as going to the theatre and watching it: just think about actors' personal -and very different- interpretations. Likewise, is a semicolon typed out the same as a silence of arbitrary lenght? No, because a semicolon often carries some subtle meanings like being generally associated to descriptive texts/complex texts. It goes without saying that this kind of reference to a shared (between author and audience) cultural context cannot be translated into an oral rendition of the source material.

So, that's why I'm confused.

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Zikoris t1_j0uxdpl wrote

It's a new thing where people just decide words mean whatever they want them to mean because feelings.

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