Do Audiobooks Count as Reading? What the Research Says

Do audiobooks count as reading? For understanding a book, yes. A 2022 meta-analysis of 46 studies with 4,687 participants found no reliable overall difference in comprehension between reading and listening. Print keeps a small edge when you set your own pace and on questions that need inference, and listening invites more mind wandering.

Below are the studies behind that answer: what each one measured, in whom, and what it can’t show. The question has a practical side too: most American adults have now listened to an audiobook, and reading challenges have to decide what counts. We make Omniphile, an app that tracks books and audiobooks side by side, so we have a stake in counting both; the evidence is what it is either way.

Are audiobooks as good as reading for comprehension?

The broadest evidence comes from a meta-analysis by Virginia Clinton-Lisell of the University of North Dakota, published in Review of Educational Research in 2022. She pooled 46 studies with 4,687 participants that compared reading and listening to the same material, across age groups. Overall, the difference between them was small and not statistically reliable.¹

Two details favored print. Reading beat listening when readers could set their own pace, and on questions that asked for inference or general understanding rather than literal recall. There was also a weak sign that reading and listening come closer in languages spelled the way they sound, such as Italian, than in English.¹ In an interview about the paper, Clinton-Lisell said the review included only competent readers, found no clear difference between age groups, and put the bottom line plainly: “It is not at all cheating to listen as opposed to read.”²

Single experiments point the same way:

• A non-fiction book on a tablet. In a 2016 study in SAGE Open, 91 participants were randomly assigned the preface and a chapter of a non-fiction book as an audiobook, as e-text, or as both at once. Their comprehension did not differ significantly, either right after or two weeks later.³
• A 2026 conference paper. In a poster at the 2026 meeting of the American Educational Research Association, researchers from San Francisco State University had college students read or hear two excerpts from Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. Preliminary results showed no difference in comprehension; knowledge of the topic predicted scores best. Students felt more confident and enjoyed the print version more.⁴ It is an early result, not yet a published paper, so weigh it lightly.

Are audiobooks as good as reading for your brain?

For grasping meaning, the brain seems to treat the two alike. In a 2019 study in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley scanned 9 people while they listened to stories from The Moth Radio Hour and, separately, read the same stories, more than two hours of narrative in all. In most of the brain regions that respond to meaning, the patterns for listening and reading were highly correlated, and a model built from one predicted the brain’s response to the other.⁵

Read it for what it is: a small, careful study of how meaning is represented, with the words shown one at a time on the screen, unlike normal reading. It doesn’t show that a year of audiobooks does for you what a year of print does. We found no study that follows the long-term effects of listening the way some studies follow readers, which we cover in is reading good for your brain?

Where reading still has the edge

The evidence is close, not identical, and the differences are worth knowing:

• Going back. The meta-analysis found print’s edge when readers set their own pace.¹ Your eyes can slow down for a hard sentence and jump back a paragraph; a narrator keeps going unless you stop them.
• Mind wandering. In a 2013 study in Frontiers in Psychology, about 200 University of Waterloo students read one passage aloud, read one silently and listened to one. When checked at intervals, their minds were wandering about half the time while listening, against about a third while reading silently and least while reading aloud. Listening also brought the poorest memory of the passage and the least interest in it.⁶ The students didn’t choose the passages, so the results may differ for a book you picked yourself.
• Reading along doesn’t add much. A 2023 meta-analysis of 30 studies with 1,945 participants found only a trivial benefit of reading while listening over reading alone, and only when the pace was set for readers; when they set their own pace, there was no reliable effect.⁷

Do audiobooks count as reading for kids?

Children are listening more. The UK’s National Literacy Trust found that in 2024, 42.3% of the 8- to 18-year-olds it surveyed enjoyed listening to audiobooks and podcasts in their free time, against 34.6% who enjoyed reading: the first time listening came out ahead since it began asking in 2020.⁸

For understanding stories, the 2022 meta-analysis covered children as well as adults and found no clear difference between age groups.² But those studies measure comprehension, not the decoding of print, which is the skill children learning to read are still practicing. The 2023 review suggests that struggling readers and second-language learners may gain from reading along with audio, but its author found too few studies to be sure.⁷ Audiobooks build a love of stories; they don’t replace practice with the page.

Do audiobooks count as reading on Goodreads and in challenges?

On Goodreads, they do: its own blog tells Reading Challenge users that “Audiobooks count!”, whether you listen while driving, cooking or exercising.⁹ Other challenges set their own rules, so check before you log.

They count with a lot of people. The Audio Publishers Association’s 2026 consumer survey, run by Edison Research, puts the share of American adults who have listened to an audiobook at 58%, an estimated 157 million people.¹⁰ And the American Time Use Survey, the source of the 20-year decline in reading for pleasure that researchers reported in 2025, already counts listening to audiobooks as reading.¹¹

What it means for you

• Count the audiobooks you followed. If you finished a book and could tell someone what happened in it, you read it in every sense the studies measure.
• Choose the format by the book. Dense non-fiction, a book for an exam or a plot with a large cast is easier in print, where you can slow down and go back. A novel or a memoir works well as audio.
• Listen when your attention is free. A walk or a long drive suits audio better than a task that needs your mind. If you catch yourself drifting, rewind 30 seconds rather than pressing on.
• Mind the speed. Faster playback saves time but leaves less room for a wandering mind; our audiobook speed calculator shows what each speed saves and compares it with silent reading.

How to track audiobooks alongside books

If you keep a reading goal, decide once how audiobooks count, then keep a log so you can see it. In Omniphile, audiobooks are their own kind of media, with readthroughs tracked by position, percentage or chapters, and a setting counts finished audiobooks, listening sessions and listening time toward your Books goals. It is off by default, so you choose. Omniphile runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac, costs nothing to download and has an optional Premium tier. If you read on Android or the web, our guide to the best book tracking apps covers trackers that run there.

Sources

1. Virginia Clinton-Lisell (2022), “Listening ears or reading eyes: A meta-analysis of reading and listening comprehension comparisons”, Review of Educational Research 92(4), 543–582. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543211060871 ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Erik Ofgang, “Listen Without Guilt: Audiobooks Offer Similar Comprehension As Reading”, Tech & Learning, March 21, 2022. https://www.techlearning.com/news/listen-without-guilt-audiobooks-offer-similar-comprehension-as-reading ↩ ↩²

3. Beth A. Rogowsky, Barbara M. Calhoun and Paula Tallal (2016), “Does modality matter? The effects of reading, listening, and dual modality on comprehension”, SAGE Open 6(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244016669550 ↩

4. Kayla King and Anisha Singh (2026), “Reading by Ear or Eye: Examining Comprehension, Self-Efficacy, and Reading Habits Across Audio and Print”, AERA Annual Meeting, virtual poster. https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/aera/aera26/online_program_direct_link/view_paper/2278763/ ↩

5. Fatma Deniz, Anwar O. Nunez-Elizalde, Alexander G. Huth and Jack L. Gallant (2019), “The representation of semantic information across human cerebral cortex during listening versus reading is invariant to stimulus modality”, Journal of Neuroscience 39(39), 7722–7736. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0675-19.2019 ↩

6. Trish L. Varao Sousa, Jonathan S. A. Carriere and Daniel Smilek (2013), “The way we encounter reading material influences how frequently we mind wander”, Frontiers in Psychology 4, 892. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00892 ↩

7. Virginia Clinton-Lisell (2023), “Does reading while listening to text improve comprehension compared to reading only? A systematic review and meta-analysis”, Educational Research: Theory and Practice 34(3), 133–155. https://commons.und.edu/ehb-fac/75 ↩ ↩²

8. National Literacy Trust, “Children and young people’s listening in 2024”, January 24, 2025. https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-reports/children-and-young-peoples-listening-in-2024 ↩

9. Goodreads Blog, “Tips to Read More Books in 2023 with the Goodreads Reading Challenge!”, January 13, 2023. https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/2465 ↩

10. Audio Publishers Association, “APA Sales & Consumer Data”, 2026 Consumer Survey, released June 5, 2026. https://audiopub.org/surveys ↩

11. Jessica K. Bone, Feifei Bu, Jill K. Sonke and Daisy Fancourt (2025), “The decline in reading for pleasure over 20 years of the American Time Use Survey”, iScience 28(9), 113288. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113288 ↩