Have you read a physical book in the last year? If so, you are increasingly in the minority; engagement with audiobooks continues to rise each year, both by the number of people experimenting with the format and by the number of books “read.” But what does this mean for culture, knowledge acquisition, and even the human attention span?
The Rise of the Audiobook: The Data
While everyone’s individual experience varies, the data show one thing clearly: audiobooks are rising in popularity at the same time that traditional reading is declining. Research indicates that multiple audiobook data points are increasing by multiple percentage points year over year, including:
- How many people have listened to an audiobook at least once (52%)
- How many have used an audiobook in the last year (38%, up from 35%)
- How many audiobooks were consumed (6.8 per year, up from 6.3)
- The number of parents using audiobooks for their children (77%)
- How much the audiobook industry is worth ($2 billion, up 9%)
When surveyed, almost half of the adults questioned noted that they did not read a book in any format within the past year; given this information and the knowledge that some avid book readers (those reading 12+ books per year) pull averages upward, it is easy to see how physical media are struggling to hold on in an ever-modernizing world.
Why Audiobooks?
Audiobooks tackle many of the modern problems that prevent people from reading—or that incentivize other methods. As technology has advanced, reading has become more accessible; while it may be cumbersome to carry a hardback book everywhere you go, an audiobook is no more than just a few taps away on your phone.
Similarly, time pressures encourage the consumption of alternative media, such as audiobooks. From long commutes to time spent exercising or doing chores, multi-tasking using audiobooks is feasible where pausing to read an in-print novel is not. In a fast-paced world, this convenience helps audiobooks stand out in a way that their physical peers cannot compete with.
However, one powerful factor that is often neglected in considerations of the rise of audiobooks is dopamine. This reward chemical triggers the pleasure center of the brain, and studies show that engaging with a story is an effective method of producing dopamine. However, thanks to the modern shift to short-form content such as TikTok, humans are gradually becoming accustomed to frequent, minor hits of dopamine. This incentivizes the use of audiobooks, which can be consumed in quick bursts in between (or even alongside) other tasks.
How Audiobooks Are Impacting Culture
As you can see, multiple factors are influencing the gradual rise of audiobooks. Shifting media habits are changing the way we consume stories, and audiobooks have stepped up to fill the cultural gap left by the physical written word. For readers, two primary factors influence how they engage with audiobooks, indicative of how these two media continue to fight for their place within greater culture.
Decoding and the struggle for meaning
For many, switching to audiobooks was an obvious choice due to a singular issue: decoding. Decoding is the process of transforming the information you read into usable detail. For example, you are decoding right now if you are reading this sentence with your eyes (rather than listening to it). Your brain is parsing letters, phonemes, words, and their meanings, putting them into your mind, and untangling their message. For many, this process is seamless (or nearly so, with very minimal delay).
However, for others, decoding is a cumbersome task. Individuals who struggle with dyslexia, for example, spend significantly more time on extracting the meaning from a text due to a slower or more garbled decoding process. Thus, for some, the introduction and rise of audiobooks has been nothing short of a revelation, and culture is pivoting to encompass the (perhaps surprisingly large) subset of individuals to whom decoding challenges apply.
The mental load
Some argue that audiobooks are their preferred medium due to the removal of decoding, which otherwise required more effort than they were willing or able to provide. However, others allege that succumbing to this very claim is problematic for culture as a whole. Research into modern culture’s fast-paced, instant-gratification expectation indicates that people are gradually losing long-term attention, decreasing their ability to remain in “decoding mode” for very long. In one survey, the average attention span decreased from 2.5 minutes (in 2005) to just 47 seconds (2025).
Proponents of physical media use this information as the cornerstone of their argument: that using audiobooks is only contributing to culture’s gradual decline in attention. That if people rely on audiobooks, their ability to decode will only degrade further.
No matter which camp you fall in, one thing is inarguably true: audiobooks have gained a foothold in the modern world, and it is likely they will continue to rise as a competitor or direct usurper of traditional print media.
