In a world so filled with technology and media choices, it has become easy for some to frequently claim that “the book was better.” While the debate surrounding this issue has been around for quite some time, there is now a fairly new incumbent into the realm of entertainment, the audiobook. Audiobooks are now a more and more accessible form of media consumption, one that, on the whole, meets with far less criticism than its visual counterparts. While obviously not a real book, the act of simply listening to an audiobook is viewed as on par with actual reading, but is this really the case? Surely the factors of comprehension and visualization must each be considered, in order to discern whether audiobooks are or are not legitimate substitutions for reading. …show more content…
Thus comprehension bears a good deal of importance to the distinction between reading and listening. Dr. Arnold L. Glass, an expert in the field of cognitive psychology at Rutgers, investigates this question in a study he conducted in 1980 (Glass). In this study, Glass performed a series of five experiments designed to test the difficulty of high and low imagery statements when read or heard by the subjects (Glass). Glass observed that, in some cases, the difficulty of the visualized sentences varied based on the imagery, but that the same sentences were understood to be equally difficult when heard (Glass). Though the conclusions from this study are not without flaw, they seem to indicate that reading sometimes enhanced and sometimes hindered the comprehension of the sentences, but that listening added clarity in almost every