Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

I made an attempt this past fortnight to return to social media. As a small author, it’s really important to make attempts at getting seen if I have any hope of selling my books. Social media is one of the best ways to do this, for better or worse. I’m not especially good at marketing myself or my stuff, so I was trying to use this past couple of weeks as an opportunity to observe and learn.

This might have been an error. In just a week and a half of returning to social media, I have stumbled across several topics in the bookish world that may have done irreparable harm to my blood pressure. And sense of optimism.

I am incredibly tempted to rant about them all here and now, but I also know that I tend towards the verbose already. So instead, I’ll tray and tackle each one individually in a short (lawd, please) series. I don’t really have a name for the series, so I’m just relating each topic to the literacy crisis that is one topic of discussion online. I believe that each of these other issues relates directly to that particular emergency.

For those of you unaware of the alarm call blasting from the various corners of the interwebs, according to the National Literary Institute, more than half of Americans cannot read past a grade six level, and nearly a quarter of adults are functionally illiterate. My brief search for the numbers in Canada revealed results that were similar. One fifth of Canadian adults are functionally illiterate.

Now I could go on about literacy, and how it is about more than reading words on a page, but that is for another article altogether. I don’t have the time for it here.

What I did want to cover is the oft-retread argument over audiobooks. I am sure I’ve mentioned this idiocy more than once, and I apologise for the repeat if that’s the case. But I swear this stupid, worn out, utterly fallacious argument is a damnable hydra, and it rears its ugly head every few months, renewed after being cut down beforehand. For those who might be new, the argument is simply that consuming audiobooks is not the same as having read those books.

Yes. Yes, it bloody well is.

There is no difference between listening to a text or reading it. It’s the same. The only difference is which organ is used to consume the text. That’s it.

I am of the personal opinion that the argument is spat out by people who are salty about busy people reading books while also vacuuming their house, or those who are trying to win a nonsensical competition of how many books can be read in a year, making up ridiculous and arbitrary rules about what reading means to make up for the perceived unfair advantage presented by audiobooks. Or something.

Whatever the reason, it’s silly. The science, incidentally, doesn’t agree with it. In a study from the University of California, Berkley, functional MRIs revealed that the manner of consumption did not matter. Whether a text was read or listened to, the same regions of the brain lit up. The means may have differed, but the effects on the brain were the same. All of this to say, and I quote:

It appears that the brain’s representation of meaning does not depend on which sense acquires the words that convey it.*

So, it is perfectly legitimate to mark a book as “read” on any tracking app if the completed text is an audiobook.

Now, if the argument was truly about input senses, then fine. Weird to start a fight about that, but no one is trying to argue that ears and eyes are the same thing. But that’s not what the argument is about. It’s one group of people trying to make themselves appear superior by declaring one manner of absorbing a text as illegitimate, and those that choose to consume texts that way “not true readers.” Which is one of the stupidest things I’ve read this past fortnight (but not the stupidest, despairingly).

The value of audiobooks is exactly the same on all fronts as print books. And, I’d argue, their value goes even further.

For those who have difficulties with the written word; dyslexic folks and the blind, for example, audiobooks open up an entire world or story and learning that they would otherwise be without. No one would tell a blind person, for example, that listening to audiobooks is less valid than braille texts, would they? Please tell me no one actually thinks that. And I personally know several dyslexic people who use audiobooks as a reading aid, listening to the book and following along on the page, saving them a great deal of frustration. It has turned many a struggling reader into an avid one.

Rather selfishly, audiobooks also represent an additional revenue stream for many writers, most of whom are chronically underpaid for our work (I don’t have any audiobooks available yet, but I am saving up to create my first. It’s going to take a while. Producing an audiobook in the quality I want isn’t the cheapest endeavour).

Lastly, I want to point out that reading is exceedingly new in our human development. Our manner of absorbing stories has nearly always been audible.

For millennia, we have listened to stories, sitting around the fire or passing the time while scraping skins or weaving cloth. Tiktig has been telling progressively more outlandish tales of her near-death encounter with a smilodon (it was a kitten and quite lost, but never let facts get in the way of a good tale). Shu has been recounting a legendary mammoth hunt, of which he was the hero (it wasn’t him, it was his uncle’s great, great grandfather, but the children won’t know that. Look how they stare at him with those wide, shining eyes). The shaman has been reciting stories of how the spirits taught humanity the medicine in plants and in ritual.

This has been happening since before anyone can remember, and likely a good deal longer than anyone could guess.

We are much more attuned to the spoken word than the written. It is a tradition that stretches further back in our history than even the appearance of anatomically modern humans. More and more, prehistoric anthropologists are pushing back human achievements, recognising the sophistication of the species that came before us.

I, for one, raise my glass to those who continue to participate in this ancient and glorious tradition. They are keeping a fundamentally human art alive.

How dare anyone sneer at that.

I am so, so done with people trying to prop themselves up by pretending their preferred methods of consuming literature of any stripe is somehow better, or more intelligent, or worthier than any other method. All of this shaming other readers and their choices (audiobooks vs print books, fiction vs non-fiction, genre vs literary fiction… ad nauseam) is, I feel, directly contributing to the literacy crisis. Who the hell wants to read if you’re just going to be looked down upon for what or how you do it? Of course people are going to stop reading. Getting all pretentious about any particular aspect is helping no one and nothing.

So knock it off, already. I’m tired.

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When S.M. Carrière isn’t brutally killing your favorite characters, she spends her time teaching martial arts, live streaming video games, and sometimes painting. In other words, she spends her time teaching others to kill, streaming her digital kills… and sometimes relaxing. Her most recent titles include Skylark,  Human and The Timbercreek Incident.