I’ll be honest with you: I was an audiobook skeptic for a long time. I’m the kind of reader who underlines passages, who flips back to check a detail from chapter three, who needs to see the words on the page to feel like I’m really engaging with them. When colleagues first started telling me they “read” books by listening, I had a reflexive, snobbish reaction. That’s not real reading, I thought. You’re just being read to. Like a child at bedtime.

I was wrong. I know that now. But getting from there to here was a journey, and I think the honest version of that journey is more useful than the polished take. So here’s the truth about how audiobooks changed the way I, and the team at ScrollWorks Media, think about stories.

The Snob’s Conversion

My conversion started with a commute. I moved apartments in 2019, and my daily drive went from fifteen minutes to forty-five. I tried podcasts for a while, then music, then silence (which lasted about three days before I started talking to myself). A friend gave me an Audible credit and suggested I try a novel.

The first audiobook I listened to was George Saunders’s “Lincoln in the Bardo.” I chose it partly because I’d already read it in print, so I figured if the audio format didn’t work for me, at least I wouldn’t be lost. What I didn’t anticipate was how different the experience would be. The print version of that novel, with its dozens of voices and its experimental structure, is challenging on the page. The audiobook, performed by a full cast of 166 narrators, was something else entirely. It was more like theater than reading. Each ghost had a distinct voice, a distinct personality, and the accumulated effect of all those voices talking over each other was hypnotic.

I sat in my driveway for ten minutes after arriving home, unwilling to turn off the engine. That’s the audiobook equivalent of not being able to put a book down.

What Audiobooks Do Differently

Here’s what I’ve come to understand after several years of listening: audiobooks are a different medium than print books. Not a lesser one. Different. They share content with print, the same words in the same order, but the experience of receiving those words is distinct in ways that matter.

The most obvious difference is the narrator. A good narrator adds an interpretive layer that print doesn’t have. When you read a novel silently, you supply the voices, the pacing, the emotional coloring. When you listen, someone else makes those choices for you. This can be wonderful or terrible, depending on the narrator and your own preferences.

I’ve had narrators transform books for me. There’s a recording of “The Great Gatsby” narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal that made me appreciate Fitzgerald’s rhythms in a way I never had before. The way Gyllenhaal handles the final pages, the famous last lines about boats against the current, gave me chills. I’d read those lines dozens of times. I’d never heard them before.

Conversely, I’ve had narrators ruin books. I won’t name names, but I once listened to a thriller where the narrator gave the female lead a breathy, simpering voice that was so distracting I couldn’t follow the plot. The same character, read silently, was smart and capable. The narrator’s interpretation turned her into a caricature. I switched to print and enjoyed the book.

This dependence on the narrator is both audiobooks’ greatest strength and their biggest vulnerability. When the match between narrator and material is right, audio can be the definitive way to experience a book. When it’s wrong, it can actively work against the text.

The Attention Question

The criticism I hear most often about audiobooks is that you can’t pay as close attention while listening as while reading. People worry that they’re only half-absorbing the material, that the words are washing over them rather than sinking in. I’ve had this experience myself. I’ll be listening during a commute, and I’ll realize I’ve been thinking about a work problem for the last five minutes and have no idea what happened in the book.

But here’s the thing: this happens with print too. Everyone has had the experience of reading a page, reaching the bottom, and realizing they absorbed none of it because their mind wandered. The difference is that with a physical book, you can easily flip back. With an audiobook, rewinding is clunkier. You lose your place. You’re not sure exactly where you drifted off.

I think the attention concern is real but overstated. Research on audiobook comprehension is mixed, but the general finding is that for most types of text, comprehension is roughly comparable between reading and listening when people are paying attention. The key phrase is “when people are paying attention.” Audiobooks are often consumed during activities, driving, exercising, cooking, that split your focus. That’s a real difference. But it’s a difference in how we use the medium, not a limitation of the medium itself.

My personal compromise: I listen to certain kinds of books and read others. Memoirs and narrative non-fiction are often excellent as audio, because the conversational tone translates well to the spoken word. Densely plotted thrillers work because they have momentum that carries you along. Literary fiction with complex, layered prose I still prefer to read in print, because I want to control the pace and linger over sentences.

How Audiobooks Changed Our Publishing

At ScrollWorks, the rise of audiobooks has changed how we think about our books from the earliest editorial stages. When I’m editing a manuscript now, I sometimes read passages aloud to test how they sound. A sentence that works beautifully on the page can be a mouthful when spoken. Long, complex sentences with multiple embedded clauses are harder to parse aurally than visually. This doesn’t mean we simplify everything for audio, but we’re more aware of how prose sounds, not just how it reads.

Dialogue is the area where this awareness has had the most impact. In print, dialogue tags can be minimal because visual formatting (quotation marks, new paragraphs for each speaker) does a lot of the work. In audio, listeners need more cues about who’s speaking. We’ve started being more intentional about making sure dialogue scenes are clear without relying entirely on visual formatting.

We’ve also started thinking about narrator casting much earlier in the process. For The Last Archive by Catherine Voss, we had a narrator in mind before the manuscript was even finalized. Catherine’s writing has a particular cadence, precise but warm, and we wanted someone who could match that. The right narrator doesn’t just read the words. They inhabit the book’s sensibility.

The economics of audiobooks have also changed our calculations. Audio rights are a significant revenue stream now, and for some titles, the audiobook outsells the print edition. This has made us more willing to invest in quality audio production, including full-cast recordings for books where multiple voices add value. It’s expensive, but the market rewards it.

The Intimacy of Being Read To

Remember my initial snobbery about audiobooks being “like a child at bedtime”? Here’s the irony: that intimacy is actually one of the best things about the format.

There’s something fundamentally different about having a story told to you versus reading it yourself. Oral storytelling is the oldest form of narrative. Humans told stories to each other for tens of thousands of years before anyone wrote anything down. When you listen to an audiobook, you’re plugging into something ancient, the experience of sitting in a circle and hearing someone weave a tale.

I notice this most with memoir and personal essay. When an author narrates their own memoir, the effect can be extraordinary. You’re hearing their actual voice telling their actual story. The pauses, the catches, the places where their voice tightens or softens, these carry emotional information that print cannot convey. I listened to Trevor Noah narrate “Born a Crime” and the way he switches between accents, between languages, between tones, made the book feel more immediate and personal than any print edition could.

This intimacy also means that audiobooks can hit harder emotionally. I’ve cried in my car listening to audiobooks in a way I rarely cry while reading. Something about the human voice carrying sad or beautiful words directly into your ears, without the mediating distance of text on a page, makes the emotional impact more direct. I’m not ashamed of this. Okay, I’m a little ashamed when it happens at a red light and the person in the next car is staring at me.

What Gets Lost

I want to be fair about what audiobooks give up, because the tradeoffs are real.

You lose the ability to easily annotate. I’m a margin-scribbler, a highlighter, a dog-ear-er (sorry, book purists). When I read something that strikes me, I want to mark it, underline it, write a note next to it. Audiobook apps have bookmark features, but they’re not the same. You can’t quickly scan your annotations the way you can flip through a marked-up physical book.

You lose control over pacing. In print, you can slow down for a dense passage and speed up through a stretch that doesn’t interest you as much. Audiobooks play at a set speed (yes, you can adjust playback speed, and yes, people who listen at 2x speed are chaotic agents of disorder, but that’s a different issue). You experience the book at the narrator’s pace, which may not match your natural reading rhythm.

You lose the visual dimension of the text. Some books use formatting, spacing, typography, and page layout as expressive tools. Poetry, obviously, but also experimental fiction, books with footnotes, books with multiple text streams. These don’t translate to audio. Mark Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” is essentially unlistenable. You’d lose most of what makes it remarkable.

You also lose the physicality of the book as object. I know this matters to some people more than others, but the feel of paper, the smell of a new (or old) book, the visual progress of a bookmark moving through pages, these are genuine pleasures that audio doesn’t replicate. The percentage counter on an audiobook app is a poor substitute for the tactile satisfaction of watching your place in a physical book advance.

The “Is It Reading?” Debate

Every few months, someone on social media reignites the argument about whether listening to an audiobook counts as “reading” the book. I find this debate exhausting and mostly pointless, but since people keep having it, here’s my position.

If you’ve listened to the unabridged audiobook of a novel, you’ve experienced the complete text. You know the story, the characters, the themes, the prose. You can discuss the book intelligently. You can form opinions about it. You can be moved by it, changed by it. Whether we call that “reading” is a semantic question that doesn’t interest me much.

What does interest me is the assumption, usually unspoken, that print reading is somehow more virtuous or more legitimate than listening. This assumption has class and ability dimensions that people don’t always acknowledge. Some people listen to audiobooks because they have visual impairments, dyslexia, or other conditions that make print reading difficult. Some people listen because their jobs and schedules don’t allow time for sitting down with a physical book, but they can listen while commuting or working. Telling these people that their experience of a book is somehow lesser is both wrong and unkind.

At ScrollWorks, we think of audiobooks as a parallel format, not a substitute or a shortcut. When we publish a book, we want it to be excellent in every format: hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audio. Each format has different strengths, and readers (or listeners) should be able to choose the one that works best for their life.

Recommendations for Audiobook Newcomers

If you’ve never tried audiobooks and you’re curious, here are some suggestions based on what I’ve learned through trial and error.

Start with non-fiction or memoir. These genres tend to have a conversational tone that translates well to audio. The transition from reading to listening is less jarring when the prose already sounds like someone talking to you.

Pay attention to the narrator. Before committing to a book, listen to the sample. Most audiobook platforms offer a preview of the first few minutes. If the narrator’s voice annoys you or doesn’t match the material, move on. Life is too short for bad narration.

Give yourself an adjustment period. The first few hours of audiobook listening can feel strange if you’re used to print. Your mind may wander more than usual. That’s normal. It gets better as you acclimate to the format.

Don’t try to multitask with demanding books. If you’re listening to something complex or literary, give it your full attention, or at least pair it with an activity that doesn’t require much cognitive effort (walking, simple chores, driving a familiar route). Save the dense non-fiction for focused listening sessions.

Try an author-narrated book. There’s nothing quite like hearing a writer read their own work. The authorial intent comes through in ways that even the best professional narrator can’t fully capture.

Where We Go From Here

The audiobook market continues to grow. According to the Audio Publishers Association, audiobook revenue has been increasing year over year for more than a decade. For publishers like us, this growth presents both opportunity and responsibility. The opportunity is reaching readers who might never pick up a physical book but who will listen to one. The responsibility is making sure the audio versions of our books are worthy of the texts they carry.

We’re particularly excited about what audio means for some of our upcoming titles. Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield has a narrative voice that we think will be exceptional in audio, and we’re in conversations with narrators who can bring the historical setting to life without descending into parody. The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo has a meditative quality that could be hypnotic with the right narrator and pacing.

I’m also watching the technology evolve with interest. AI-generated narration is getting better, and some publishers are experimenting with it for backlist titles and lower-budget projects. I have mixed feelings. The quality is improving, but it still lacks the warmth and interpretive intelligence of a skilled human narrator. A human narrator makes choices, emphasizing a word here, pausing slightly longer there, that reflect a deep understanding of the text. AI narration is getting closer to mimicking this, but there’s a qualitative difference that I think listeners can feel, even if they can’t articulate it.

For now, at ScrollWorks, we’re committed to human narration. It’s more expensive and more logistically complicated, but we believe the quality difference matters. When you listen to one of our audiobooks, you’re hearing a real person who read the book, thought about it, and brought their full artistry to the performance. That’s worth paying for.

My own relationship with audiobooks has settled into a comfortable hybrid. I read in print when I can. I listen when print isn’t practical. I no longer think of one as superior to the other. They’re different doors into the same room. What matters is that you get into the room.

If you’re a print purist who has never tried audio, I’d gently encourage you to give it a chance. You might hate it, and that’s fine. But you might, like me, find that it opens up hours of reading time you didn’t know you had, and that some books come alive in ways you never expected when a skilled voice carries them to your ears.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.