MAGAZINE
Reading with your ears
We read less and less, and it’s not because we don’t love books: we lack time, our eyes are tired and our attention is stretched thin. Audio doesn’t replace the page. It gives back hours we thought were lost.
Less time to read
In France, the Centre national du livre’s 2025 barometer puts average reading time at thirty-one minutes a day, with fewer than one reader in two reading every day or almost every day: the lowest level in ten years. Screens, meanwhile, continue to gain ground.
This decline has a cost we all sense. Long-form reading is one of the few exercises that teaches us to follow a thought across hundreds of pages, inhabit someone else’s mind and encounter words we never use. A novel by Dumas or an essay by Montaigne cannot be summed up: you have to make your way through it.
Is listening still reading?
The question comes up often, as if the ear were cheating. History answers first: for centuries, reading meant reading aloud. In the fourth century, Saint Augustine is astonished in his Confessions to see Bishop Ambrose reading silently: “his eyes ran over the pages and his heart searched for their meaning, but his voice and tongue rested.” Silent reading was the exception. Evening gatherings, radio serials and the bedtime story read to a child have carried this practice down to us; the magazine told part of its story in When we read aloud.
Research points in the same direction. In 2016, American researcher Beth Rogowsky gave the same book to three groups: one read it, another listened, and the third did both at once. After an initial reading, there was no notable difference in comprehension. In 2019, a team at the University of Berkeley used brain imaging to observe that the meaning of a story is registered in the same regions of the brain, whether we read it or hear it. The text comes in through another door; it lives in the same house.
Hours the screen can’t take away
Audio’s great advantage isn’t replacing the book; it’s going where the book can’t.
First, behind the wheel. You can’t read while driving, but you can listen. According to the book-use barometer (Sofia, SNE, SGDL), half of listeners also listen away from home, mainly in the car on long journeys. An hour of driving a day, and a medium-length novel takes two weeks of commutes.
Then there are all those moments when your hands and eyes are occupied but your mind is free: walking, running, doing the dishes, ironing, gardening, standing in line, or riding a train too crowded to open a book. We think they’re lost; audio gives them back to reading.
Rest your eyes
Many of us spend our days in front of a screen. In the evening, our eyes demand their due: they sting, the page blurs, and the book slips from our hands after three paragraphs. Listening, by contrast, works with our eyes closed, in the dark, lying down. It lets reading continue when our sight cries uncle, and it doesn’t add another screen to the day: here, reading goes on with the screen switched off.
A different pace
Reading with your eyes means moving at your own speed, skipping ahead and going back. Listening means accepting the pace of a voice, and sometimes that’s a gift. The voice carries punctuation, distinguishes the characters and lets us hear the music of a sentence. An older language, like Montaigne’s or Chateaubriand’s, can feel intimidating on the page, but often becomes clearer when spoken: we understand it with our ears before we understand it with our eyes.
For those who find decoding difficult—people with dyslexia (6 to 8% of the population, according to the Fédération française des Dys) and people learning French—audio opens the door to great works without the ordeal of decoding. And listening while following the text with your eyes is often the best of both approaches: that’s why every book here can be heard and read.
What audio can’t do
It would be dishonest to present it as a miracle cure. A University of Waterloo study (2013) showed that the mind wanders more when we listen than when we read, and that we retain less as a result. Beth Rogowsky herself points out that the page still has the advantage when it comes to studying a text in depth, going back and annotating it.
So it takes some care to choose when to listen: a familiar route rather than an unfamiliar road, a routine task rather than work that demands your full attention. Audio doesn’t replace reading: it accompanies it, extends it, and sometimes brings it back to life.
What we offer
The books on our Audiobooks page are in the public domain: classics we all encountered at school without always reading them. Some are read in full by our synthetic voices, others by LibriVox volunteers, who have made their recordings available to everyone since 2005. Everything is free, with no account and no advertising. Listen here, add the feed to your podcast app to continue with the screen off, or keep a book on your phone for the road when there’s no network. The magazine articles can be listened to as well: here’s how.
Happy listening. And happy reading: it’s the same thing.
Credits: Cover: Nathan Anderson, CC0, Wikimedia Commons. Figure 1: Anicet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier, public domain, Wikimedia Commons · Figure 2: Martin Münch, CC0, Wikimedia Commons · Figure 3: Shixart1985, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons