Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Thesis

Department

English

Mentor

Dr. Joshua Pittman

Abstract

Audiobooks have become increasingly popular among book lovers, and a popular debate has arisen: does listening to audiobooks count as reading? Much scholarship validating the medium as reading has emerged, arguing that the act of listening to an audiobook is synonymous to the act of reading a printed book. Audiobooks, however, deliver a different experience from a printed text, which Lutz Koepnick details, saying, “whatever we do with them may have little to do with reading in any rigorous sense, that intricate process by which we decode written signs in order to construct meanings at various interwoven levels” (234). This category crisis perhaps can be solved by looking at how people in the Middle Ages experienced stories, which Joyce Coleman reports on, saying, “contemporary records show that literate, sophisticated people with good access to books went on choosing to listen to those books throughout the late Middle Ages,” which she calls aurality (65). Audiobooks are neither reading nor disconnected entirely from the concept of a book; rather, they exist in the category of aurality, similar to the way people performed and listened to written stories aurally in the Middle Ages. Accepting this can allow audiobooks to use more affordances unique to aural storytelling. Audiobooks provide an immersive and memorable experience that differs from printed books, and fantasy authors can use those affordances to transpose stories into rich, aural tales that implant on the listeners amongst mundane tasks.

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