From the May/June 2002 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

As Good as Reading?
Kids and the Audiobook

BY PAMELA VARLEY

n a recent Monday morning, I arrived at work and made a beeline for the office of my friend Esther, to tell her I had just finished reading a novel she had specially recommended. Esther is an avid and opinionated reader, and I was looking forward to a lively discussion. Her face lit up briefly, then clouded over. “Did you read it?” she asked suspiciously. “Or did you . . . listen?”

I had listened. I mostly do these days. That’s not what Esther objects to, though. What bothers her is my loose talk — the way I say I’ve “read” a book when, really, I’ve chopped vegetables and folded laundry while listening to someone else read it. Reading purists resist this blurring of the lines. In conversation with Esther, of course, I give no quarter on this point. I roll my eyes and mention the word hair-splitting. But privately? I know listening is different. Not “reading lite,” but different.

Audiobooks have grown into a two-billion-dollar industry in the United States. According to the Audio Publishers Association, 22.5 percent of households surveyed in 2001 reported that someone in the home had listened to an audiobook in the previous year — nearly twice as many as in 1995. Children’s audio has grown, too, but it has traditionally been a small part of the business — a peaceable backwater. Public and school libraries were loyal customers, but until a few years ago, retailers were unwilling to give any shelf space to children’s audiobooks.

That’s no longer the case. In the last two to three years, kids’ audiobooks have gotten a mighty pull forward from the Harry Potter series, the fastest — selling recorded books in history. The first in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, is inching toward platinum — the coveted million-copies-sold mark, achieved by only two other audiobooks, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, as of Publishers Weekly’s latest tally. In all, the four Harry Potters in audio form have sold more than 2.5 million copies. That’s good news not only for the audio publisher of the Harry Potter series — Listening Library, a leader in unabridged recordings of new children’s and young adult titles — but for children’s audio publishing in general. The families who bought and enjoyed the Harry Potter audios have started coming back for more, and, banking that the trend will continue, publishers are expanding operations with newfound confidence. In 1999, Random House acquired Listening Library and has since doubled production output to about sixty-five titles a year. In the fall of 2000, the audio wing of HarperCollins also began to publish its own new children’s titles. By December 2001, the company had released twenty-five titles and plans to continue with about twenty per year. Audio publishers are also taking more business risks with kids’ audio projects these days — for instance, recording and publishing them alongside the hardcover version instead of waiting to record only the books that win awards. And they are experimenting with more expensive forms of production, such as Listening Library’s elaborate full-cast narration of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which features the author as narrator and a large stable of actors (forty in the final volume) reading the lines of the different characters.

In the publishing world, this surge of activity is cause for celebration. But the more popular audiobooks become, the more we have to decide what we think of them. In a world where fewer children are choosing to read books in their free time, are audiobooks a new cause for hope, or a new cause for worry? So far, teachers and parents have had an equivocal reaction. We book lovers always expected our kids to fall in love with reading the way we did, cocooned in the intense privacy — and silence — of reading. Audiobooks engage the senses so differently. My friend Jolie, mother of a bright and book-loving six-year-old, recently reported that her daughter has become “addicted” to audiobooks, and she isn’t sure how to react: “I keep thinking, is this as good as reading, or as bad as watching TV?”

UNCERTAIN WHETHER AUDIOBOOKS belong to the respectable world of books or the more dubious world of entertainment, elementary- and high-school teachers have often cast a fishy eye at them, and many have opted for the safe course of avoidance. Denise Marchionda, an audiobook partisan and former assistant professor of education at Notre Dame College in New Hampshire, says that future teachers are not necessarily any more receptive. Not long ago, some of her graduate students were complaining of their reading load, and she encouraged them to do some of their required reading via audiobook. Shocked, they protested that this would be “cheating.”

In elementary and high schools, the use of recorded books has traditionally been limited to ESL students and children with particular problems in reading — dyslexia or other learning disabilities, visual impairment, autism. In this context, audiobooks have become a bridge to reading — a way for children to absorb literature at their own comprehension level while they address the mechanics of the decoding process. Also, for kids who missed out on bedtime stories as young children, audiobooks have proved a helpful introduction to the rhythms and cadence of literary language; thus the read-while-you-listen approach gained some popularity for beginning readers. But audiobooks have generally been seen as a means to a better end — reading — or a second-best alternative for kids who could not read. Today it is less common for teachers to talk about recorded books as cheating. But they are still rarely used for mainstream and gifted readers. In fact, they hold a stigma, for many kids, as remedial.

That attitude may be changing, though. A small but growing number of librarians and educators have been speaking up to say that audiobooks are a misunderstood, underused, and under-
valued resource. Reading expert Betty Carter notes that there is a stark difference between the role audiobooks play for children and the role they play for grownups. In the adult world, surveys have repeatedly shown that the most devoted fans of audiobooks are die-hard book lovers and avid readers, frustrated that modern bustle does not afford more time for reading. Commuters still constitute the largest share of adult listeners, and all that time on the road allows people to extend their reading significantly. I think of one woman who gleefully calculated that if she listened to books during her commute, she could “read” an additional eighty to one hundred books per year. Heady with this newfound sense of possibility, adult listeners have often explored books they otherwise would not have considered. History buffs may try a mystery, for example. Readers of current fiction may experiment with novels of the nineteenth century.

Some educators wonder whether audiobooks could play a similar role for today’s busy kids, who also spend a lot of time in the car, ferried to soccer practice and play dates and music lessons. Some parents report that when parent and child listen to a book together, they see a side benefit: an easy pathway to important topics of discussion. Here and there, classroom teachers, too, are experimenting with audiobooks — to introduce students to books above their reading level, to model good interpretive reading, to teach the much-neglected skill of critical listening, to show children the humor in books (something they often miss), and to get kids past such difficult hurdles as unfamiliar dialects, nonstandard English, old-fashioned literary styles, and unusual vocabulary. Sometimes they hook kids on a book by playing the first few chapters, then send them home with the print version of the book to read the rest.

Even more radical, some educators argue that, unto themselves, audiobooks are a legitimate way for kids to study and enjoy literature. “What is a book?” asks library science professor Karen
Harris. “Is it the black marks on the white paper? Or is it the content of the story, or the message, or the theme?” To Harris, the actual task of reading is not the main event, but the mechanical prelude to engaging the content. Listening is an alternative avenue to that same content. And what matters is what the readers’ minds and imagination do with the content once they arrive. It is not that anyone disputes the need to teach children to read, of course; the need to read is thoroughly woven into the fabric of everyday living. But the benefits of reading aloud to small children are well established, and some educators think listening may be the missing link for older kids, too — a way to win over their hearts and minds to literature. “I think there’s a fear that listening will compromise the development of other skills,” says Robin Whitten, editor of AudioFile, the leading magazine devoted to audiobooks. “But this may be a great way to get kids to buy into literature. And, realistically, we probably are not going to go back to the days when kids spent hours and hours with books.”

Are we really willing to say listening is as good as reading? The idea raises all kinds of issues. For one thing, there are questions about whether there are differences in our memory, understanding, and perception of a book, depending on whether we have read it or listened to it. No one is really sure about that. At a simple level, of course, we can see some differences. Junko Yokota, professor of reading and language at National-Louis University in Illinois, observes that children who have read, but not heard, a Harry Potter book tend to develop imaginative theories about how to pronounce the unfamiliar name Hermione, as in Hermione Granger, Harry’s book-smart pal. (J. K. Rowling makes an inside joke of this in her fourth book, which includes a character who adores Hermione but continually mispronounces her name.) By contrast, children who have heard, but not read, the book tend to develop imaginative theories about how to spell the exotic-sounding “Her-MY-un-nee.” Thus, the linguistic dilemma posed by Hermione Granger is slightly different in each case. But if there are larger distinctions to make about the brain’s perception of a book when we have listened to it rather than read it, we have not yet figured them out. People who are comfortable both reading and listening often report that they can detect no differences. Frequently, in fact, they cannot remember afterward whether they read a given book or listened to it.

On the other hand, we can readily sense that the experience of reading is different from that of listening. At Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, a recent study comparing the brain activity of people when reading and listening confirms that the brain does, in fact, work differently during the two activities. The brain’s complex language comprehension system is engaged for both, but some parts of that system work harder in reading, and some (short term or “working” memory, for example) work harder in listening.

Perhaps the most basic difference in the experience of the two is that, for most people, listening is easier. For some, it is nearly effortless — “like breathing,” as the mother of a dyslexic audiobook fan puts it. Of course, listening is not easier for everyone. Many adults and children — and often they are nimble and confident readers — find it nearly impossible to keep their attention from wandering off while listening to an audiobook. But as a general rule, educators have found that children can understand books read aloud at a comprehension level significantly above the level of books they can read to themselves.

The fact that listening is easier, though, far from filling us with delight, tends to fill us with suspicion. I understand this reaction. A few years ago, I saw an advertisement for one of those devices that claims to exercise your abdominal muscles while you lie down and relax. I knew it was a fraud, yet yearned for it to be true. Are audiobooks like that, I worry? When I listen, am I missing something crucial that I get when I read?

Partisans of reading say yes. The rap on listening is that it is more passive than reading. That is, the reader exerts more effort and more control over the process, and, in consequence, the reading experience bears a more personal stamp. Most obviously, readers must wrest the basic meaning from the symbols on the page and also supply an interpretation. Though recorded books require attentive listening, they do, by their nature, come to us already decoded and interpreted; the narrator mediates between author and reader. To some critics, that represents an intolerable intrusion on imagination. In a 1993 Harper’s Magazine article, literary critic Sven Birkerts called the voice of the reader “one of the subtler aspects of the reading magic” and argued, “Hearing a book in the voice of another amounts to a silencing of that self — it is an act of vocal tyranny. The listener is powerless against the tape voice.”

While it is true that the listener is dependent on the narrator in some respect, I believe Birkerts misunderstands the way listening to an audiobook really works. We rely on the narrator to bring us a reading that is, at the most basic level, clear. Beyond that, one hopes for a narrator with a subtle grasp of the book and its characters and the vocal control to bring that across. Some narrators are better at it than others. Anyone who listens much to audiobooks soon becomes fiercely opinionated about narrators. The good news in this is that we are not sheep. We do not accept whatever interpretation comes along.

In my case, I am aware of listening simultaneously on two levels — one for the language and story, and one for a running assessment of the narration. I think, “Hmm, got that line wrong.” Or, “Hunh, I wouldn’t have read it that way, but I like it.” Consider, for example, E. L. Konigsburg’s Silent to the Bone. Konigsburg has a talent for portraying precocious kids — their earnest deliberations, their trenchant observations, their unwitting misconceptions. In the audio version of Silent to the Bone, an unfolding mystery about a teenage boy told by his best friend, Connor, the narration by Howard McGillen was clear and respectful, but to my ear McGillen didn’t get the precocious young Connor’s voice quite right. He missed the boy’s excitement, his indignation, his irreverence. His inflections were a little too careful, a little too self-conscious for a thirteen-year-old, even one as smart and kind as Connor. That’s too bad, but what’s interesting is that when I listened, I “heard” in Connor a slightly different sensibility from the one McGillen was enacting. How did I hear through the narration to my own sense of character? I’m not sure, but I observe that we do something similar when we reflexively appraise the acting in a movie or play — even when we are encountering the characters or story for the first time. As in all things, of course, some of us are more opinionated about narration than others. But the opportunity for critical thinking is there. And while this process of inwardly correcting the narrator is not the same as creating a voice from the words on the page, neither is it passive.

Children — though still developing their critical faculties — know when they like a narrator and when they don’t. The eleven-year-old daughter of a colleague reports that she did not like an audiobook she heard in class, because the voices were dreary. “They’re not as nice as the voices in my head,” she says. I remember my own indignation as a child at hearing the chirpy and artificial voice Disney gave to Winnie-the-Pooh — so debased compared to the woolly gravitas of my own inner Pooh. In other words, Birkerts’s worry about tyranny is misplaced. Listeners, even young ones, are too rebellious for that.

Beyond the question of interpretation, readers exert control in another way — in the freedom to stop, to re-read, to flip back through a book, to speed up, to slow down, to slip glancingly over passages that do not appeal. Birkerts wrote of this “ever-modulating engagement” and of the importance of pauses — moments in his reading when he would “stop my finger at the margin and gaze out into the middle distance. . . . Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse.”

By taking command of a physical book, readers do have an advantage over listeners. The limitation on the listener’s ability to flip back to a particular passage creates a corresponding limitation on which books work in audio format. Not all do. Some books include an important visual aspect — maps, family trees, charts. And some books are written with the expectation that the reader will do some flipping back and forth. Karen Hesse’s Stowaway, about an eleven-year-old boy who goes on an adventurous ship journey, begins each brief journal entry with the ship’s location — often given as longitude and latitude coordinates. The idea is that the reader can track the ship’s journey. Or the reader can ignore the coordinates and read on. In audio format, though, we can do neither, and — despite a much-praised narrator — we may become distracted and annoyed by all the coordinates. The audio version of Virginia Euwer Wolff’s Bat 6 provides a slightly different example. This story — of a sixth-grade softball game, an emotionally damaged child, and an episode of racial hatred — is told by way of twenty-one alternating first-person narratives. It was ambitious to attempt this book in audio form, and the ten-member cast performs well, but in the absence of assiduous note-taking, the listener cannot realistically hope to keep track of who’s who. It is no small job in the print version, either, but, again, the reader has the advantage of being able to flip back and forth. Similarly, books that feature frequent changes of time, place, and point-of-view tend to require some re-reading and referring back. A patient listener can still enjoy such books in audio form, but it is helpful to have a copy of the print book nearby.

Even for more traditionally structured books, readers have an edge over listeners in controlling the process. For instance, in an audiobook, the pace of the narration is static — and that pace may be too fast for some listeners and too slow for others. On the other hand, the listener need not let the tape control the process altogether. Like Birkerts, for example, I need to stop sometimes while listening, to go back, to hear again, to gaze out at the middle distance. There are buttons on the machine for that, called “pause” and “rewind.” Granted, it is cumbersome. Yes, it lacks the ready flexibility of the physical book. And if, in the spirit of modern multi-tasking, the listener is upside-down in a complicated yoga asana or elbow deep in a cooking project, these moments may be awkward. The listener may have to re-hear a section of the book later on. Someday the technology for listening to audiobooks may evolve to permit easier handling. But even without that, even in the clunky here and now, the listener is not held to a rattletrap pace against her will. The car may have cruise control, but the driver can always step on the brake.

Partisans of reading have noted that — partly as a result of the reader’s control over the interpretation and the reading process — there comes, in reading, an intricate and subtle blend: the author’s thoughts, captured and deposited on the page, mingled with the reader’s presently thinking mind. “As I read about [characters] Laura and Nick, about the psychological and emotional intricacies of their relationship, my psyche begins its own strange oscillations,” writes Birkerts in the essay “Notes from a Confession.” “I’m reading about them, and paying close attention, but at the same time I’m reprocessing, in split-second bursts, my own history, the events of my own relationship.” In a similar vein, fiction writer Harold Brodkey, in his essay “Reading, the Most Dangerous Game,” describes reading as “perhaps more intimate than any other human act” and “not much different from a love affair, from love, complete with shyness and odd assertions of power and of independence and with many sorts of incompleteness in the experience.”

The idea that reading is more intensely private and personal than listening is interesting. Though I do have personal reactions to books when I listen, I agree that there is something about reading that is more intimate and entangled. But this can be a liability as well as a strength of reading. We bring our personal limitations to each book we read — limited historical understanding, limited cultural understanding, limited psychological insight, limited vocabulary. And limited patience. Sometimes, in our restlessness, we read a work of literature with the same ruthlessness we might apply to a website or newspaper, searching for the juicy and exciting tidbits and leaving the rest. In her essay “True Confessions of a Reader,” novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz says that, however useful in the proper circumstance, this kind of scanning is less like “true reading” and “more like shopping, riffling through racks for the precise shade of blue.”

We also bring our current preoccupations to the book. In fact, we sometimes bring so much of ourselves that we miss the book entirely. If you are worried about your love life at the moment you decide to read Anna Karenina, for example, you may see more of your own concerns than Anna’s in Tolstoy’s pages. “We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves,” writes editor and author Joseph Epstein in his essay “The Noblest Distraction.” “We also use them like larders, extracting from them those items we need to satisfy our hungers of the moment. Rereading can be, in this connection, a humility — inducing activity, when, on rereading, one learns that the first time around with a book, one’s politics or fantasies or personal anxieties were in fact doing most of the work.”

Listening can provide a refreshing deliverance from our own limitations, from our misbegotten reading shortcuts, and from the more dubious and self-referential parts of the reading process. We still bring our messy selves to the enterprise, but, stubbornly, audiobooks hold us to the text. They do not take liberties. They do not skip things. They do not skim things. They do not twist things. They insist that we hear the whole book, exactly as written. In this way, they can keep us from veering too far off-course. (In this way, they also shine a dangerously bright light on a book’s failings. Bad writing, wooden dialogue, false emotions — these may be skimmed and ignored while reading, but when listening to every painful syllable, they can become unbearable. Some audiobook fans therefore reserve their trash-reading for print books.)

For many listeners, well-narrated versions of well-written books have another special talent: a heightened ability to mesmerize the listener. One of the great satisfactions of engaging with a good book is finding oneself in a state of total absorption — of being transported to another world. Both reading and listening, at their best, offer this experience. But if one thing has struck me about the way people describe listening to audiobooks, it is the reported intensity of their absorption and the emotional grip of the experience. “They go right to your soul,” says one listener. “Extraordinary — like a waking dream,” says another. “Fiercely vivid,” says a third. “Like being seduced,” says a fourth. “Or maybe drugged.”

Sometimes people who have both read and listened to the same book report a striking difference in the nature of the emotional experience. Betty Carter recalls reading Ruth White’s Weeping Willow, about an Appalachian girl who is raped by her stepfather. She liked the book a great deal when she read it and later decided to listen to it in the car. When the pivotal scene came, Carter found, to her amazement, that her reaction was overwhelming. “I had to pull off the road,” she says. “I felt physically sick.” Later, reflecting on why her reaction to the audio version had been so much stronger, she theorized that when reading, she had subconsciously protected herself from the rape scene. “I knew it was coming, and I kind of skipped over it quickly. You can move in and out as a reader. But on tape, it was right there in the car with me, and the impact was very strong.”

Preston Wilson, a high-school English teacher in Auburn, New York, goes so far as to argue that the difference between silent reading and listening is the difference between an intellectual experience of literature and an emotional experience akin to the visceral response one might have to a painting or a symphony. “Imaginative literature is always dramatic and, as such, needs to be performed either by the silent reader or by a talented narrator. Unfortunately, we silent readers often make a hash of good literature upon reading it, especially for the first time,” he says, noting that readers must struggle to “perform the book” without yet knowing the characters or the shape of the story. “But when it is performed for us by a gifted oral interpreter, the power, meaning, and beauty of the artistic work come forth uninterrupted.” The result, he adds, is that listeners are free to experience a work of literature more completely and accurately. Literature was never intended to be mediated by a fleet of English teachers, he says, nor was it meant to be an anxious or laborious chore: “Audiobooks allow literature to assert itself as a phenomenon to be enjoyed instead of a puzzle to be solved.”

PERHAPS THE OPPORTUNITY presented by today’s burgeoning crop of children’s audiobooks is to teach kids to observe how reading and listening differ, how they alter the experience of a book, and to let them discover, for themselves, which they prefer, in what circumstances, and why. From my own experience, I know what it is to lose books: I was a book-lover as a young child, but I lost the ability to read for pleasure in junior high. In the years that followed, I tried over and over to recover it, but not until my early thirties, when I discovered listening for pleasure, did I really fall in love with books again. I look on audiobooks gratefully — and wistfully, thinking of those twenty lost years. Kids’ lives are complicated, their troubles are many, and we grown-up book lovers know that books might be a comfort to them — maybe even a saving grace. But for any number of reasons, some children never discover what books can give, and others lose it along the way. That’s a big topic — one for another day; one with no easy answers. But I believe that audiobooks will give some kids a fresh chance to find their way to books, and other kids, a new way to hold onto them.

In that light, I love the story of Rosina Williams, age twelve. As a toddler, Rosina showed all the signs of a burgeoning book lover, clamoring for more when her parents read her bedtime stories. But to their surprise, Rosina did not make the shift to avid reader as she got older. In school, where she was a very good student, she read at grade level, but she did not develop a love of reading. She still loved being read to — loved books physically, loved picking them out in the bookstore. She loved everything about books, in fact, except the reading. Tests later showed a mild dyslexia. Determined that her child not miss out on books, Rosina’s mother, literary agent Robin Rue, discovered children’s audiobooks — and Rosina took off. She gradually listened more and more — in the car, in the bath, curled up on the couch looking out the window. She listened to new books and she listened, over and over, to her old favorites, knowing just which part of just which tape she wanted to hear again. Rue marvels at her stamina — at how long she can listen in utter absorption.

Like any book lover, Rosina is opinionated about books and impassioned about the books she loves. And, like most avid readers, she is intensely hostile to abridgments. Two years ago, when she discovered to her dismay that she had acquired several abridged children’s books, she wrote an irate letter to HarperCollins, and persuaded her entire fifth-grade class to sign it. “You see, all but one of your tapes that I own has been abridged, even Roald Dahl’s,” she wrote, appalled at this last lapse of judgment in particular. HarperCollins wrote a wisely conciliatory response explaining that these were older titles, and that Harper’s new children’s audiobooks were, in fact, unabridged. But if cultivating a love of books is the point, somehow, of our worry about kids and reading, then Rosina has already gotten there, and she’s gotten there entirely by way of audiobooks. How many children care enough about books, after all, to collect signatures in defense of Roald Dahl’s literary integrity? And what author wouldn’t sell his eyeteeth for such a dedicated patron — even if she never “reads” a word he’s written?

Pamela Varley is a journalist and public-policy case writer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.