Is listening to a book considered cheating?

Although audiobooks are the fastest growing segment of publishing, there are still plenty of people who believe that listening to a book is somehow low and lazy, that, put baldly, it’s cheating, in this view, reading is virtuous in the same way that working is, while listening amounts to some kind of handout.

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But is listening to a book cheating? If the question doesn’t even make sense for people with impaired vision or reading disorder, like dyslexia, it makes more to the millions whose days include commuting and generally slogging away at tasks audiobooks have arrived to leaven for the lost to drudgery and tedium. Listeners are able to enjoy books they’d never have had time otherwise. In this respect, audiobooks were made for getting things done.

Disparaging audiobooks often springs from the feeling that a listener can’t take in a book as fully as a reader can. Neuroscientists have, of course, weighed in on the subject. The conclusion reached in the anxiously titled 2019 study The Representation of Semantic Information Across Human Cerebral Cortex During Listening Versus Reading is Invariant to Stimulus Modality from the Journal of Neuroscience is, in a nutshell, that we understand words whether they are read or heard.