I Collected Them Before I Listened to Them
I own about a thousand audiobooks and barely listened to most of them. It was a collecting habit. Then one small swap changed that completely.Share on X
I own about a thousand audiobooks, and for years I barely listened to them.
I collected them the way some people collect anything. I picked them up on specials and sales, never at full price, because audiobooks are expensive and I refuse to pay sticker for them. They piled up on my tablet, a little bit of everything, always available, mostly unplayed. It was a collecting thing more than a listening thing. I liked having them. I just wasn’t using them.
Audiobook Appreciation Month falls in June, and it’s a good excuse to talk about audiobooks, including the part where owning them and using them are two very different things. Because eventually I figured out how to close that gap, and it was simpler than I expected.
The Swap That Changed Everything
I replaced useless YouTube videos with audiobooks. Same dead time, completely different result. The collection finally had a job.Share on X
Then I started using audiobooks to replace something worse.
I was spending time on useless YouTube videos, the kind of half-watching that eats an evening and leaves nothing behind.
So I made a deliberate swap. Instead of clicking the next pointless video, I put on an audiobook. Same dead time, the time I was going to waste anyway, but now it produced something. I was either learning or being entertained instead of just filling the air with noise.
That one change finally gave my collection a job. Right now I’m working my way through Nine Princes in Amber, the first book in Roger Zelazny’s Amber series. It’s been slow going, but that’s fine, because the alternative wasn’t finishing a great book faster. The alternative was another hour of YouTube garbage.
Measured against that, even slow progress through a good book is a clear win. The audiobook isn’t competing with reading time I would have spent anyway.
It’s competing with wasted time, and against wasted time it wins every single round.
An audiobook competes with wasted time, not reading time, and wins every round.
Why Audiobooks Are Not Cheating
Some readers get snobbish about audiobooks, as if listening to a book doesn’t really count. I don’t buy it. The story goes into your head either way. You follow the plot, you meet the characters, you feel the ending. A narrated book is still the book.
For some of us, audiobooks aren’t a lesser option, they’re the option that keeps reading possible at all.
As eyes age and print gets harder, audio is how the reading life continues instead of ending. And for everyone, audiobooks unlock time that print can’t touch. You can’t read a paperback while you drive, cook, walk, or wait in a line. You can listen to a book through all of it. That’s hours a week that were previously unreachable for reading, suddenly available.
Calling that cheating misses the point entirely. It’s reading in the cracks of your day where a physical book could never go.
The Author’s Side of the Microphone
I think about audiobooks from the other side too, because I publish my own books as audiobooks. When you produce one, you learn fast that audio is its own experience, different from print read aloud, and it exposes different things.
A sentence that looks fine on the page can clatter when a narrator says it. Dialogue that seemed clear gets confusing when you can’t see the quotation marks and paragraph breaks. Audio strips a book down to its sound, and weak writing has nowhere to hide in a narration. That’s a gift to writers. If you want to know whether your prose works, hear it read aloud, because the ear is honest in a way the eye isn’t.
The same quality that makes audiobooks great for listeners, that they turn a book into sound, makes them a brutal and useful test for the people who write them.
For authors, audiobooks are also simply a market you shouldn’t ignore. A growing number of readers consume books primarily through their ears, and a book without an audio edition is invisible to all of them. If you’re publishing and skipping audio, you’re leaving both readers and income on the table.
| Who | What audiobooks give them |
|---|---|
| Collectors with unplayed books | A job for the collection: replacing wasted video time |
| Busy people | Reading while driving, cooking, walking, or waiting in line |
| Readers with aging eyes | A way for the reading life to continue |
| Writers revising | An honest ear that exposes clumsy sentences and unclear dialogue |
| Publishing authors | Access to readers who consume books through their ears |
How do you spend Audiobook Appreciation Month?
If you already love audiobooks, June is your month, so listen to something good and enjoy it without apology. If someone tells you it doesn’t count as reading, ignore them.
If you have a collection you never touch, like I did, try my swap.
Pick the next chunk of time you would have wasted on your phone, your endless scrolling, your useless videos, and put on an audiobook instead. You don’t have to carve out special reading time or change your schedule. You just have to upgrade the dead time you already have. Start with one book, one commute, one chore, and see how much of your day was secretly available for stories all along.
And if you write, listen to your own work, or have a tool read it to you.
You’ll hear every problem your eyes have been politely ignoring. Audiobook Appreciation Month is a fine time to remember that books were spoken long before they were printed, and that listening to one isn’t a lesser way to read. Sometimes it’s the only way that fits the life you have.