Do Audiobooks Count as Reading?

Does it matter?

I spend the majority of my day with a connected pair of white wires dangling from my ears. If I’m alone, whether at work, in the car on my four-hour commute, or doing various duties around the house, my iPod and iPhone are with me. I leave the wires behind for meetings during the day, family dinners at night, and when I’m catching up with friends over drinks, but otherwise I’m almost always plugged in.

What comes out of those wires varies greatly. In the past few weeks alone I’ve cycled through Pusha T, Bret Easton Ellis, Eminem, Anthony Jeselnik, Lauryn Hill, Alec Baldwin, YG, Bill Burr, Method Man, Kevin Smith, Nas, Howard Stern, and many more. Though I love listening to comedians and hip-hop will always be my first love, I spend more and more of my time listening to audiobooks.

For years, the only interaction I had with audiobooks was the Risk Management joke on Seinfeld and when Stern’s guys would cut up an autobiography to make the famous author say something hilariously ridiculous and raunchy. That was it. Then, at some unknown point in the mid-‘00s, I listened to my first one. Then another. Then two more. Soon, instead of listening to Wu-Tang Forever for the thousandth time, I was now having a soothing voice read to me as if I were a child preparing for bed.