Are Audiobooks Real Reading? An Honest Answer From a Thriller Writer

Are audiobooks real reading? Yes. When the material is the same, listeners and print readers come away with remarkably similar understanding of a story — the plot, the people, the thing that doesn’t add up. What differs isn’t whether the book got into you. It’s the door you walked through. Print and audio are two entrances to the same house.

Are audiobooks real reading if someone else does the voices?

This is where the objection usually lands. A narrator makes choices you would otherwise make silently: how long to hold a confession, how tired a senator sounds at 2 a.m., which line to lean on. That isn’t cheating. It’s interpretation — the same thing an actor does with a script. And it doesn’t relieve you of the work that actually counts: tracking motive, holding a dozen names in your head, noticing the detail in chapter three that turns the knife in chapter thirty.

Which books work best in audio?

Thrillers, honestly, are built for it. Short chapters, forward momentum, scenes that end on a turn — it’s structure that rewards someone washing dishes or stuck on I-76. Audio struggles with books you need to flip backward through: dense nonfiction, anything with charts, and the twisty procedural where a buried name pays off three hundred pages later. If you’re the kind of reader who stops to re-read a paragraph and catch the setup, print may still serve you better. I write the Bull Moose books hoping they hold up either way, and plenty of readers tell me they did book one in the car and the rest on the page.

Does listening count toward your reading goal?

Count it. The only reading that doesn’t count is the reading you didn’t do. A reader who finishes twenty books a year through earbuds on a commute has read twenty books; a reader who owns forty beautiful hardcovers and has opened two has read two. The format is a delivery mechanism. The story is the point.

If you want to test the question yourself, grab the free prequel and try it whichever way fits your week. Then tell me in the comments: are you a print loyalist, an audio convert, or — like most of us now — whichever one is closer to hand?

Frequently asked questions

Are audiobooks real reading? Yes. Comprehension studies consistently find that listeners and print readers understand the same story about equally well. The format changes the experience, not whether you read the book.

Do audiobooks count toward a reading goal? They should. A book you finished in the car is a book you finished. Reading goals are meant to measure stories consumed, not pages physically turned.

Which books are best as audiobooks? Fast-moving fiction with short chapters — thrillers, mysteries, memoir. Dense nonfiction, anything with charts, and plots that require flipping back are usually easier in print.

Want a political thriller you can’t put down? Claim your free copy of The Senate Deception, the award-winning prequel to the Bull Moose series — and join 3,000+ readers who never miss a release.

About the author: Michael Fedor is the award-winning author of the Bull Moose political thriller series. Drawing on 20 years inside politics and campaigns, he writes pulse-pounding fiction about power, democracy, and the fragile machinery of the republic.