The Literacy Crisis – Audiobooks
Good afterevenmorn, Readers!
I made an attempt this past fortnight to return to social media. As a small author, it’s really important to make attempts at getting seen if I have any hope of selling my books. Social media is one of the best ways to do this, for better or worse. I’m not especially good at marketing myself or my stuff, so I was trying to use this past couple of weeks as an opportunity to observe and learn.
This might have been an error. In just a week and a half of returning to social media, I have stumbled across several topics in the bookish world that may have done irreparable harm to my blood pressure. And sense of optimism.
I am incredibly tempted to rant about them all here and now, but I also know that I tend towards the verbose already. So instead, I’ll tray and tackle each one individually in a short (lawd, please) series. I don’t really have a name for the series, so I’m just relating each topic to the literacy crisis that is one topic of discussion online. I believe that each of these other issues relates directly to that particular emergency.
For those of you unaware of the alarm call blasting from the various corners of the interwebs, according to the National Literary Institute, more than half of Americans cannot read past a grade six level, and nearly a quarter of adults are functionally illiterate. My brief search for the numbers in Canada revealed results that were similar. One fifth of Canadian adults are functionally illiterate.
Now I could go on about literacy, and how it is about more than reading words on a page, but that is for another article altogether. I don’t have the time for it here.
Yes. Yes, it bloody well is.
There is no difference between listening to a text or reading it. It’s the same. The only difference is which organ is used to consume the text. That’s it.
I am of the personal opinion that the argument is spat out by people who are salty about busy people reading books while also vacuuming their house, or those who are trying to win a nonsensical competition of how many books can be read in a year, making up ridiculous and arbitrary rules about what reading means to make up for the perceived unfair advantage presented by audiobooks. Or something.
Whatever the reason, it’s silly. The science, incidentally, doesn’t agree with it. In a study from the University of California, Berkley, functional MRIs revealed that the manner of consumption did not matter. Whether a text was read or listened to, the same regions of the brain lit up. The means may have differed, but the effects on the brain were the same. All of this to say, and I quote:
It appears that the brain’s representation of meaning does not depend on which sense acquires the words that convey it.*
So, it is perfectly legitimate to mark a book as “read” on any tracking app if the completed text is an audiobook.
Now, if the argument was truly about input senses, then fine. Weird to start a fight about that, but no one is trying to argue that ears and eyes are the same thing. But that’s not what the argument is about. It’s one group of people trying to make themselves appear superior by declaring one manner of absorbing a text as illegitimate, and those that choose to consume texts that way “not true readers.” Which is one of the stupidest things I’ve read this past fortnight (but not the stupidest, despairingly).
The value of audiobooks is exactly the same on all fronts as print books. And, I’d argue, their value goes even further.
For those who have difficulties with the written word; dyslexic folks and the blind, for example, audiobooks open up an entire world or story and learning that they would otherwise be without. No one would tell a blind person, for example, that listening to audiobooks is less valid than braille texts, would they? Please tell me no one actually thinks that. And I personally know several dyslexic people who use audiobooks as a reading aid, listening to the book and following along on the page, saving them a great deal of frustration. It has turned many a struggling reader into an avid one.
Rather selfishly, audiobooks also represent an additional revenue stream for many writers, most of whom are chronically underpaid for our work (I don’t have any audiobooks available yet, but I am saving up to create my first. It’s going to take a while. Producing an audiobook in the quality I want isn’t the cheapest endeavour).
Lastly, I want to point out that reading is exceedingly new in our human development. Our manner of absorbing stories has nearly always been audible.
For millennia, we have listened to stories, sitting around the fire or passing the time while scraping skins or weaving cloth. Tiktig has been telling progressively more outlandish tales of her near-death encounter with a smilodon (it was a kitten and quite lost, but never let facts get in the way of a good tale). Shu has been recounting a legendary mammoth hunt, of which he was the hero (it wasn’t him, it was his uncle’s great, great grandfather, but the children won’t know that. Look how they stare at him with those wide, shining eyes). The shaman has been reciting stories of how the spirits taught humanity the medicine in plants and in ritual.
This has been happening since before anyone can remember, and likely a good deal longer than anyone could guess.
We are much more attuned to the spoken word than the written. It is a tradition that stretches further back in our history than even the appearance of anatomically modern humans. More and more, prehistoric anthropologists are pushing back human achievements, recognising the sophistication of the species that came before us.
I, for one, raise my glass to those who continue to participate in this ancient and glorious tradition. They are keeping a fundamentally human art alive.
How dare anyone sneer at that.
I am so, so done with people trying to prop themselves up by pretending their preferred methods of consuming literature of any stripe is somehow better, or more intelligent, or worthier than any other method. All of this shaming other readers and their choices (audiobooks vs print books, fiction vs non-fiction, genre vs literary fiction… ad nauseam) is, I feel, directly contributing to the literacy crisis. Who the hell wants to read if you’re just going to be looked down upon for what or how you do it? Of course people are going to stop reading. Getting all pretentious about any particular aspect is helping no one and nothing.
So knock it off, already. I’m tired.
When S.M. Carrière isn’t brutally killing your favorite characters, she spends her time teaching martial arts, live streaming video games, and sometimes painting. In other words, she spends her time teaching others to kill, streaming her digital kills… and sometimes relaxing. Her most recent titles include Skylark, Human and The Timbercreek Incident.
There are a few audiobooks that I have listened to (Richard Poe’s reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is brilliant, and I can’t imagine a more difficult text to real aloud – the man refused to use punctuation) but only if I have already read the book myself, for a reason which has nothing to do with brain science, which I’m certainly not qualified to comment on anyway.
When I read a book myself, I’m interpreting it as I go, almost constructing it for myself, as it were, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, even word by word. When I listen, on the other hand, what I’m getting is someone else’s construction, someone else’s interpretation. That, for me, is a decisive difference. I’m sure it’s not for a lot of people, and I’m fine with that. Just as I don’t always agree with everyone else, I don’t expect everyone else to agree with me, and it’s certainly nothing to get nasty about. (On social media, of course, there’s nothing that’s NOT worth getting nasty about!)
I read audiobooks regularly, and I agree that if you have listened to the audiobook you have read the book. But I’ll make a slight caveat — the reader of the audiobook can affect your experience — can, in essence, change the book.
Sometimes for the bad — one recent audiobook I listened to, T. Kingfisher’s What Stalks the Deep, was severaly marred by a reader who seemed to be doing a William Shatner interpretation — pausing at really weird places, putting stress on the wrong syllables, stuff like that. This was especially bad in this case because Kingfisher’s prose has a certain quite effective rhythm that was utterly ruined in this case. I eventually just got the prose version and read that instead.
In another recent case, Ann Leckie’s Radiant Star, the reader was generally a good reader, but made one mistake, in my opinion. They chose a voice for one character that was extremely annoying — very whiny. I THINK they made this choice on purpose, because they perceived the character as whiny, which I though was very unfair to that character.
Sometimes the narrator is good enough to (arguably) read it BETTER than I do, or at least to add interest. This can be done with good choices for character voices. (And these should NEVER by obtrusive — they should always be subtle.)
That goes to what I was saying about interpretation. I think it probably makes a greater difference when listening to a fiction book rather than a nonfiction book, though I can imagine it effecting some of those too.
Hang on. We’ve been in a Literacy Crisis since at least 2000. Only NOW are people getting upset about it? …For crying out good’n’loud, folks and their thresholds for when something qualifies as a problem….
I would never advocate for audiobooks as a total replacement equivalency for reading (let’s face it, even Braille reading develops different neurological structures and mental problem-solving processes than only listening to something), but listening to an audiobook is *definitely* reading. Additionally, in support of your comments about oral tradition, a higher proportion of listening to reading has a positive impact on memory, because we treat what we hear as a temporally restricted resource, where words on a page are indefinitely available.
We have a really judgmental society, today. But that begs a question: if a higher percentage of people were functionally literate, and if people who were more-than-functionally literate were literate to a higher degree,* would we be more judgmental or less judgmental of each other? The Ivory Tower is more stereotyped for stove-piping snootiness than the drug mules who get picked up on the Arkansas highways. Our tendency to bicker and put people down might be more up to what we’re reading, more than who can read.
*Please, please, please, PLEASE bring back the expectation of a 9th+ reading level! Most of us couldn’t dare open our mouths to President Lincoln, anymore.
Regarding the much-discussed “literacy crisis” I can say this – in my twenty-two years in the classroom (teaching third, fourth, and fifth grades) I have seen a sharp decline in students’ ability to deal with text. You of course always have some kids who are stronger readers and others who are weaker readers, but more and more even intelligent, motivated kids struggle to extract meaning from basic text (we’re not talking Ulysses, here – we’re talking about a fourth grade science or history or reading textbook).
So often it goes like this – a student says, “Mr. Parker, I can’t find the answer to this question.” “Did you read the paragraph/page/section?” “Yes.” (And he’s telling the truth; he did read it.) This bright student can read it and reread it and still cannot, on his own, extract meaning from the text. Until I literally put my finger on it, it remains invisible, nothing but words among other words. Students can decode, but they can’t READ.
Not all of them, and not all of them to the same degree, but enough of them (and so many more now than two decades ago) that it scares the hell out of me.
Since I started teaching, I’ve always read to my class every day – Charlotte’s Web, Sounder, James and the Giant Peach, the Phantom Tollbooth, Holes, The Book of Three, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH – we always have a book going, and it’s our favorite part of the day; the kids love listening to me read. (I’m pretty good at it, if I do say so myself.) I just want them to know how wonderful reading is. I think I’ve convinced some of them – a little. I do know that we need to do everything we can to move the needle on this, or we’re in big trouble.
Hear! Hear!
An odd question, but you might know the answer as a teacher: Do they still teach reading to kids in parenting classes? I heard that they stopped doing that at least a decade ago, in some areas, and wonder if that has had an impact in this.
I do know that teachers themselves mention it to parents all the time. As a side note, I only get to read to my kids because I teach in a private school, and we pretty much call our own tune. In public schools (here in California, anyway), teachers are so locked into the script that districts force on them that they rarely if ever have the time to read a book to their kids.
When I see old students, my reading to them is the first thing they mention and the thing they remember most. You would think people would learn something from that…
(Please don’t take it amiss that I say) God bless you for the work you are doing.
Your students, at the least, will probably learn and pass along the wonderfulness of reading and reading to kids. If it’s any comfort, there may be an up-tick in young adults reading to each other, even if not to children. Several under-thirty couples in my church and previous churches have mentioned that not just reading together but reading to each other is a foundational part of their relationship. If they end up with kids, family reading stands to become a thing.
Another point of curiosity: it sounds like some of your students are having difficulty moving from data to information in that data-information-knowledge-wisdom progression. Is the difficulty only happening with the non-fiction they’re reading, or do you also see it with the fiction reading?
I do think the difficulty is more pronounced with informational text than it is with fiction, though it is evident there too.
(And I’ll never take a God bless you amiss, seeing that I teach in a Christian school!)