> Audio books are fine but actual reading is important too. The "escape from reality" is not relevant part but being served without doing the work is. I disagr

> Audio books are fine but actual reading is important too. The "escape from reality" is not relevant part but being served without doing the work is. I disagree that audiobooks are not a substitute to actual reading, with respect to your point regarding the medium itself. Perhaps you have a point regarding the kind of material and listening that one can multitask/commute while listening. But stories were first transmitted orally and provoked imaginations and creativity with the same limited information all the same, and continue to. It is arguably the more primitive and natural medium for storytelling but that for a period it was only economical to disseminate them very widely by writing. Whatever beneficent mental work goes into reading fiction especially I believe happens in aural listening. If on the other hand you argue that it is the work that goes into interpreting the written word visually, I would say that the same work happens outside of fiction as well, including all the lowbrow and instrumental reading that we do all the time nowadays.