Audiobooks vs Reading: The Ultimate Comparison

Queen Camilla has met many disreputable characters in her time as a royal, but her encounter this week with two celebrity reprobates was at least for a good cause. The queen has appeared in the Beano alongside its celebrated bad boy Dennis the Menace and his dog, Gnasher, as part of a campaign to promote reading. It wasn’t the cartoon Camilla’s waspish waist that captured the headlines (“I wish,” she said of her comic strip avatar), but what she had to say while encouraging the tween menace to “go all in” for reading: “Comics and audiobooks count too!” Audiobooks have boomed in popularity in recent years – the revenue they generated for UK publishers rose by almost a third in 2023-24 – becoming an increasingly central part of the industry. But do they truly count as “proper” reading? Is listening to a book while doing the dishes, walking the dog or drifting off to sleep really as valuable as sitting down to read it? For authors, the publishing trade and those encouraging reading and literacy, the answer is increasingly yes. “Reading is about the content and not the medium,” says Debbie Hicks, the creative director of the Reading Agency, a charity that promotes the personal and social benefits of reading and leads nationwide reading programmes in schools, prisons and communities. Audio may have been traditionally viewed as a lesser medium, acknowledges Hicks, “but we need to reframe what it means to be a reader and throw off these traditional value hierarchies linked to print and books. Reading is about the content and not the medium.” The benefits of audiobooks to those who are visually impaired, dyslexic or time poor are obvious. They can also act as a gateway for those who might be less inclined to read – while significantly more women than men are readers, more men (33%) than women (24%) listen to audiobooks weekly. The charity’s research shows that the benefits of audio go further: when it comes to developing comprehension skills or acquiring vocabulary, the evidence shows audio is as effective as print, says Hicks. Jon Watt, the chair of the Audio Publishers Group at the Publishers Association, welcomed the queen’s comments, pointing to research by the National Literacy Trust in 2024 that found 37.5% of children and young people felt listening to audiobooks had encouraged them to do more traditional reading. More than half (52%) said listening to audio helped when they felt stressed. “Listening is a gateway to reading,” says Watt. “It inspires a love of storytelling which is absolutely critical in getting children to want to read or listen or engage with a story. At a young age, really what we want is them engaging with stories – whether they’re listening or reading, it helps literacy.” In his day job, Watt is the audio and business development director at the publisher Bonnier Books, and he says that for the industry as a whole, audio is “absolutely critical right now”. “Audiobooks are now a major part of the industry and they’re absolutely not an afterthought for anyone in publishing now. At the moment they know they are buying a book, people will be thinking about the audiobook along with print and e-acquisitions. You’re thinking about it in all its formats and that’s been a huge change over the last five years.” The evidence for audio’s increasing centrality is everywhere, he says, from the growing number of books that sell more audio than print and digital copies – once a rarity – to the fact that celebrity memoirs are now routinely narrated by their authors. (“Ten years ago, you would have struggled to get any celebrity near a microphone.”) Spotify introduced audiobooks in 2022 and other new platforms such as Spiracle have entered the market, while the starry casts of audiobooks on Amazon’s service Audible tell their own story: a new production of Pride and Prejudice stars Marisa Abela, Harris Dickinson, Glenn Close, Bill Nighy and Jessie Buckley. For some authors, it may mean abandoning print altogether. The Guardian’s film critic Peter Bradshaw has published three novels in the traditional way; for his latest work about a troubled NHS nurse, entitled Mercy, he pitched first to the actor Joanna Scanlan as narrator, and then directly to Audible, which released it earlier this month on audio only. Publishing on audio alone has been “an amazingly liberating and exciting experience”, he says. “If you’d have asked me five years ago, I’d have said the [physical] reading experience is the authentic experience.” But when a good friend recently told him he was reading George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, “what that meant was he was listening to the audiobook narration”. “As far as he was concerned, he was paying just as much attention to it and getting just as much out of it as he would if he was reading a book. And who knows, this might be the way forward?”