Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday.

If my voice sounds a little thin, it's because I spent the whole day yesterday recording the Everything is Tuberculosis audiobook, which I'm really excited to be narrating. Audiobooks are one of the ways in which I feel extremely old. So this is a little alarming, but my first book, Looking for Alaska, came out almost exactly twenty years ago, and back then, the world of audiobooks was much, much different, like we mostly called them books on tape or books on CD and they came in boxes! And like I remember maybe a few months after Looking for Alaska came out, my editor called me and said "There's going to be an audiobook!" And I was like, "That's amazing!", mostly because I was getting paid a thousand dollars, but also, because it meant that an actor was going to perform my book which is just an incredible feeling, i- it was as close as I ever get to expected to get to a movie or TV adaptation.

But back then, it was a very small business – most books never came out on audio – and if you ask me if, like, audiobooks counted as "reading", I- I guess I would have said, "Maybe? I've never thought about it." But at the time, I certainly worshipped at the altar of written language AS written language, you know? I thought there were all kinds of complexities and nuances that simply didn't translate to audiobooks. Of course, I also didn't yet realize that there are also all kinds of complexities and nuances to audiobooks that don't translate to print. Partly because I didn't really listen to audiobooks, and partly just because of this, like, long-standing bias against them. I didn't understand that a great narrator can bring a book to a new kind of life, like a mediocre book can become amazing. And yes, if you listen to the audiobook of a great novel like Ulysses, you're gonna miss some of the visual text-based puns. But if you read it with your eyes, you're gonna miss some of the audible puns.

So my stance on audiobooks has changed a lot in the last 20 years – I now think that they're not only definitely reading; for many people, they're the best kind of reading! I mean, the point of reading is to ingest someone's words and ideas in the most transparent way possible, right? You want to spend minimal time decoding what the words are and what they mean, and maximum time, like, living in the world those words create or else, understanding the ideas those words are trying to share or whatever. For someone like me who decodes the written word quite easily, eye reading works great because I don't have to spend much time turning the scratches on a page into words and ideas that exist in my mind, but many people are not like me. In fact, a lot of research indicates that most people aren't like me; most people retain information better from audiobooks better than they do from printed books. And so for many people, audiobooks are the ideal way to read because that's how the words become most transparent.

I actually think the argument over whether audiobooks count as reading misses the fundamental joy of reading which is that it's different for everyone, right? Like if 10,000 people read the same book, on some level, that's 10,000 books because the reader is such a co-creator of the book with the author. And now that there are so many more audiobooks available, it's great news! It makes information and storytelling so much more accessible, but I will say, we still have a long way to go on that front, like so many books aren't audiobooks, especially, like, textbooks and learning-based books for schools and that's just, it becomes a needless barrier to learning.

Now I'm not saying that reading an audiobook and reading a print book are the same, like I understand that they are different; when you're reading a print book, your eyes can linger for as long as you want on a single passage or you can skip a paragraph that looks boring. When you read an audiobook, the narrator is guiding a lot of that. On audio, meanwhile, you can experience nuances that may be lost in print when it comes to inflection and pace. The whole idea that you're somehow a better or superior reader if you read via your eyes instead of via your ears seems to me a legacy of a narrow way of understanding how we acquire knowledge and tell stories. Like I said, most people retain more information from audiobooks than from print books, and if the job of a book is – as Horace said so long ago, to delight and instruct – then audiobooks do that job! And the explosion of audiobooks – I mean, the Anthropocene Reviewed audiobook has sold almost as well as the paperback – that explosion has been great news for readers who can now access stories in the ways that they want to! But it's also great news for authors because it means more people engaging with those stories. Many of the people who were termed so-called "reluctant readers" turn out to be voracious readers, they just want to read on audio! And now that audiobooks are being published simultaneously with the print version and the costs are lower, it really is readers' choice, and as an author, I don't care, I'm just delighted that you're reading it!

Here's one irrefutable way in which I know that audiobook reading is reading. These days, I often go back and forth between audio and print, depending on where I'm at. Like, I don't want to read a print book while I'm washing the dishes because they're not waterproof. On the other hand, I don't want to read an audiobook while I'm going to bed at night because reading with my eyes relaxes me more. And they're both reading! I could tell that they're both reading because in both cases, I understand what's happening in the book! Both ways of reading reach into the way down deep and help me feel less alone in the dark, difficult, abstract stuff that sometimes, without books, I wouldn't even have language for.

That's reading!

Hank, I'll see you on Friday.