Once Upon A Time, Dear Listener...

Recently I've gotten into audiobooks. I discovered that not only does Grooveshark offer a great, big selection of music, it's also chock full of audiobooks as well.

Now the thing that makes audiobooks particularly appealing to me is this. I'm an absolute multi-tasker. I get things done, but remarkably, it often involves skipping around and completing a whole bunch of little tasks at once. It's like I have a bar graph in my head that goes upward towards progress, and I can't stand having just one bar shot up much further than the others, otherwise it just feels so unbalanced.

(This is something very not-German about me. Germans focus on one task and one task alone. Do not attempt to distract them from this task. It is like distracting a charging bull. This is not to say that Germans are dumb-witted and can only concentrate on one thing at a time, or that they are violent and blindly rageful. They are just very determined. You will rarely hear a German say, "Sure, let's do that while we're on the way there." It just doesn't happen.)

Back on topic. As an avid reader in years before, I used to think audiobooks were kind of "cheating." They were good for something to listen to in the background, like radio, but I aloofly never counted it as "having read the book" if one had listened to them by audiobook.

But now I find myself questioning that a bit. What difference does it make if you read it holding the book yourself or you hear it read to you? Sure, maybe that's not the own voice you would have read it in in your head, per se, but the content is all really the same, right? (And sometimes, I find that the storyteller does an even more excellent job than I would have.) On top of this, being able to have "read" a book while at the same time making crème brûlée, folding laundry, drawing surreal geometric art or training your pet ridge-scale dragon to leap through a smoke ring makes it all the better. There is so much more efficiency. One thing I really started disliking about reading is that it's very much a single-item activity. You need at least one hand (and you only have two). You need to have your eyes on the page. You sometimes need to block out your ears. And very often, you need much more concentration in order to absorb anything out of the book at all.

So what do you think? Is hearing the book read, not as a child but as an adult, worth just as much as literally having read the book yourself?