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- Can You "Read" an Audiobook? Wrong Question
Can You "Read" an Audiobook? Wrong Question
Ask instead, "Did someone write my podcast?"
Julia Barton
June 19, 2025
“Can I say I ‘read’ an audiobook?” is one of those questions that will keep making the rounds til humanity burns (so…maybe not much longer?). Just Google it, and you’ll happen upon Metafilter in 2004, or WIRED in 2022. It never seems to get answered, only argued forever in the comments.
Call it reading, call it listening — I really don’t care. I’m just jealous. Because at least people seem aware that someone wrote an audiobook.
Print: an endless prestige party since 1436.
Audiobooks are text-based. That seems obvious, given that they’re called “books.” Furthermore, audiobook narration is centered on the premise that “I am reading you words in a written manuscript.” There’s a mini-industry of audiobook proofers, who ensure fidelity to the text. Furthermore, books have authors — maybe more than one, and maybe some are ghostwriters. Authorship comes with, if not money, at least the collective public relations efforts of millennia of authors and book-based religions.
We do not, on the other hand, say that podcasts or radio shows have authors. And yet many of them rely on writing — an especially demanding form of writing — to get made. A large part of what you hear in radio documentaries, narrative podcasts, and news programs is written and rewritten before you hear it. But unlike audiobooks, the end product tries to hide its textual origins from your ears.
Leave no trace
About half my job, while I’m editing a narrative podcast series, is done in shared script docs. With rough first drafts, I’m giving broad notes on structure, asking questions, and reacting to various moments. After early revisions, I’m giving finer-tuned notes and suggesting rewrites. If there’s interview or archival tape, I’m also listening to that and making sure it’s working on its own terms and in concert with the narration. Later, I’ll incorporate fact-checking and legal review notes.
But at some point in the process, my job shifts. I start to back away from the page, because I don’t want the episode to sound like it’s coming off a page. I’ll take an .mp3 of an early rough mix, sometimes called a “scratch mix,” out for a walk so I can start to experience the story as a listener. When the host goes into the studio to track narration, I will be listening to suggest rewrites if a sentence feels awkward out loud, or if the host is struggling with some word. I may coach them to slow down, to remember they’re not there to barrel through what they wrote, but to tell the story to a listener, someone who’s hearing it all for the first time. We listen to interview clips during tracking, so the host can again hear what people said and how.
Even interview-based shows require a ton of planning and preparation for those recorded conversations to flow well for the listener.
Regardless of format, post production involves more listening to mixes. Now there are two “documents,” the audio mix file and the script, which becomes more of reference doc. The host will almost always have to come back into the studio to retrack some bits as it all comes together. This is a lot of work for an episode to sound “natural.”
Is all of this, in aggregate, writing? The authors I’ve worked with at Pushkin Industries certainly work hard on the writing and rewriting. But in other ways, podcast production is “completely different from writing,” as historian Jill Lepore said about making the first season of her show The Last Archive.
In a way, it reminds of when my kids were little. I used to have all the kids in the neighborhood to my house for a week at the end of the summer for a backyard theater camp; “The Pirates of Penzance” or “The Producers.” It was complete and utter chaos the entire time. It was bananas. This is kind of like that; super fun, every minute a blast, lots of snacks. And a lot of really wonderful people trying to put something together. But also bananas.
Sometimes these author-led narrative shows gain the attention of a book reviewer, as did Michael Lewis’ Against the Rules when it debuted in 2019. But one gets the sense that the reviewer is under some duress.
“If you’re used to reading Lewis’s books in silence, the accoutrements that come with many podcasts will stick out more than they normally might,” wrote John Williams in The New York Times. “There are moments when it seems that the main difference between Lewis on this show and Lewis on the page is that a high-hat drum sometimes plays behind his voice on the show.”
Williams hopes “this move of his isn’t a meaningful data point in some larger cultural trend, and that he will keep doing what he does best, which is write books.” Status update: Lewis has continued to do both!
Something bodiless
Some of this bookish animosity, I’m pretty sure, comes from semantic confusion induced by the broad term “podcast,” which applies to everything from completely unedited chat shows to the painstakingly reported Serial, whose seasons are often years in the making and go through dozens and dozens of rounds of edits and revisions. All sold on the same shelf, the vast cornucopia of podcasts horrifies critics like Sam Kriss, who calls them “overrated” in the British grump-core magazine The Spectator:
“People put on podcasts when they’re at work, or during their commute, or while they’re doing the dishes. When they’re drinking coffee, alone, in a shop full of strangers or glassy-eyed and immobile on the bus. It is the soundtrack to 21st-century loneliness: turn off your brain for a bit, fill it with other people’s chatter — a kind of foam insulation for the inside of your skull.”
Kriss tries, weakly, to include Serial in that category of “chatter,” accusing it of merely conveying vibes after a few of his friends had an emotional reaction to the show’s first season. The thing that annoys me about these almost-good think-pieces is that they might offer useful insights if their authors could conceive of podcasts as a written form, one that has canonical texts, varied genres, and complex layers.
Because even while over-conflating, Kriss does put his finger on a problem with many podcasters: “They know (or, mostly, hope) that they are being overheard by invisible strangers from the future. So they aggressively over-perform the act of chatting. A kind of patter that’s constantly looking over its shoulder, play-acting itself: a creepy facsimile; something bodiless pretending to be human.”
Or you could just say: the people making that show don’t know what they’re doing and can’t hear why it’s not working. They’re not planning their conversation with intention, they’re not delineating roles, and they’re not allowing any time to fix issues in post production. They are not using the tools of writing and editing. That’s most likely because, just like their professional hater Sam Kriss, the producers are stuck in the fantasy that this podcasting endeavor is all about “talk.” And “talking,” you see, arises from — and results in — vibes. No pencil needed.
A plumber in a palace
We know that many public speeches are written by someone other than the speaker. We know that plays have wrights. Why do we cling to this childish belief that radio and podcasts are just folks talking? No doubt, part of the blame lies with producers, myself included, who erase our steps behind us and work hard to deliver shows that sound conversational, not written. Our illusion works, and we are proud of that.
But why do we believe the illusion is necessary? I think, in the end, it’s because we’ve inherited the assumptions and contradictions that radio built long ago. First of all, as I’ve explained, the two biggest US radio networks insisted for decades that all programs be delivered live. Ironically, that meant that everything had to be super regimented and scripted, so that one live production (often only 15 minutes) could end, and the next one begin, exactly on time. And yet, the promise of live radio was not regimentation — it was vividness, closeness, the unexpected and “real.” The whole business was insane, a kind of Gutenberg meets Broadway meets Speakers Corner, on meth.
Take all the words in all the full-length pictures produced in Hollywood in a year, and you do not have enough words to keep radio in the United States going for twenty-four hours. Or, take all the words in all the Broadway plays produced in the last ten years; they still could not feed the hungry coast-to-coast giant for one day. Twenty million words, 17,000 different programs — every day. No one knows how many writers handle this assignment.
A few radio playwrights like Norman Corwin attained author status, keeping the rights to their works and even publishing collections of their dramatic scripts. But for the most part, broadcasting didn’t like the notion of writers having power. Writers in adjacent fields, especially during the hungry years of the Depression, looked on in horror. They wanted that radio money, but not the treatment.
The status of the writer remains the central enigma of broadcasting… Even from the daily press, he may look forward some day to the distinction of a byline. Only when he takes his talents into broadcasting does he become the perennial Oliver Twist, a useful but an unloved drudge. It is amazing that the attitude should have persisted so long.
There were two main reasons why writers didn't get much credit in the early decades of radio. Many were utility players, writing “copy” or “continuity” for announcers to cue up programs and introduce guests. And in other cases, writers worked not for networks or stations, but for the ad agencies that actually produced the shows paid for by brand sponsors. The sponsors might be heavy-handed or have a light touch, but either way, the writer had to play by their rules.
Radio material and the people who write it are not thought of in literary terms by the industry. Radio writers are considered employees, to be called in when it becomes necessary to "build" a radio show, or "prepare" a radio script. By and large, the average radio writer has accepted this attitude toward his craft. He has been painfully aware of the crass use to which his literary efforts have been put, and he has been even more painfully aware of the fact that he does not work with bookmen or men of letters, but with salesmen.
After World War II, radio writers got serious about organizing and formed a union, the Radio Writers Guild. And honestly, it is a joy to read some of the sick burns these hacks lobbed at their own business. After all, script writers were, as Albert N. Williams put it, “What the dramatist is to drama, the composer is to music, and the sculptor is to sculpture. They are authors in an industry that depends almost entirely upon authorship. But their way of life can be compared to that of a plumber in a palace. They are required to use the back door. Their requests for money are the subject of haggling that would shame a fishwife. Their calling is deplored by the very people who make their devices a necessity.” (Listening, p. 51)
Yeah! Something’s gotta give! And it did, at least for a while. Near the end of 1947, the membership of the RWG voted to authorize a strike. Much drama ensued. But that story you’ll have to wait to “read” in a future post.
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