“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.