This is a fascinating view to me. What exactly do you think it's cheating? The physical experience is different maybe, but take a 100 people reading and they'll have a different physical experience in the process of reading. Are some of them cheating?
If you consider a book as an information delivery system or "experience" delivery system, the information and experience is delivered in both formats?
What are you ranking a book on that audiobooks "cheat"?
(This is a genuine question, this topic fascinates me and I'm interested in people's views on it. I've been an audiobook reader a long time, but find the idea that "audiobooks are the same as reading" just as weird as the idea "audiobooks are a lesser / invalid reading".)
As someone who has read thousands of books in his life, and always asks about the books on the shelves on the houses I visit, I would say that there is a so much people that do not read books with intrinsic and genuine interest.
They buy books as a status, intellectual symbol, but they couldn't care less about its content. It's an ornament, like a flowers' vase.
I like audiobooks too. It can only be cheating if you believe there is a proper way to experience a book. I enjoy specially some books narrated by their authors, because it adds the nuances of what they consider important, emphasis and information that is lost on paper.
I’ve never actually seen that in the wild. Plenty of houses with no books at all, which always makes me feel rather sad for the people who live there, but I’ve never seen one of these “status” bookcases.
What do they even fill it up with? How is it status when they don’t even know the contents?
I've switched completely to audiobooks for any kind of books (fiction primarily, but also non-fiction) that do not have code in them, or any other material that requires visual consumption. I made the switch more than 10 years ago. I am doubtful I'll ever be able to consume heavy prose requiring concentration and re-reading of the same or previous paragraphs via audiobooks; or poetry; so probably no Gravity Rainbow, or Infinite Jest, or the Bible for me; but for light reading, it's perfect.
Unlimited services like Storytel are pretty cheap. Not library-cheap, but similar to Spotify.
> and the concept still feels like cheating to me.
Nah. It'd only be cheating if you somehow need the practice in physical reading. Like school kids or something. I'm confident in my abilities to parse the written word. I "read" books to absorb the ideas in them and using spoken books allows me to do that while driving or cleaning.
I find audiobook performances are usually quite bad or cheesy. Even the ones that people rave about. I also find radio plays, or podcasts with full scripts, the same way.
I also find them simply boring to listen to, even the ones of books I love. It feels very passive and I'm always slightly annoyed that I can read significantly faster than the wpm of an audiobook (speeding up an audiobook ruins the performances).
Completely agreed re. Jeff Hayes. I've enjoyed to some terrible books more than I should have because he narrated them. He definitely leans more towards performance than just narration though and he does an excellent job of it. I stumbled across a cold read of his for DCC book 5 and the way such different voices flow smoothly out of the same face messes with my head.
For non fiction it's I think audiobooks are a no-brainer.
For fiction, having a narrator's voice brings a social context and coloration that might not be appreciated, but when the choice is between not finishing a book (= not buying any sequel any other book after that) or getting a slightly different experience, I'd take the latter, and I think the market is better for it.
They just seem so expensive to me, and the concept still feels like cheating to me.