Turning pages, swiping screens, and hitting play: Is reading always the same to our brain?

August 5th, 2025

Written by: Catrina Hacker

For most of my life, I’ve been an avid reader. Luckily for me and all the other bookworms out there, it’s easier than ever to get access to books in all their forms. Like many others, while I still appreciate sitting down with a good paper book, I also listen to my fair share of audiobooks and keep a few books on an e-reader for easy access on-the-go. Over time, I’ve gotten a good intuition for what books I’m going to enjoy most in print, audio, or electronic form, which got me wondering— what’s the difference? As a lover of both books and the brain, I decided to explore what neuroscience can tell us about how these forms of reading differ and why I might enjoy certain types of books in one format versus another.

Print versus audio

There are a lot of obvious differences between reading a print versus audiobook. With physical books our brain uses the information provided by our eyes to extract meaning from marks on a page, whereas with audiobooks our brain uses the information conveyed by our ears to identify a set of sounds as words with a particular meaning. These seem like very different tasks, so a clear first question is whether our brain can extract the content of what we’re reading the same whether it’s read or listened to.

One group of researchers addressed exactly this question by measuring brain activity as people read versus listened to the same stories¹. The researchers found that the parts of the brain that process the content of a story were activated in the same way regardless of how the story was presented. Some parts of the brain might be more specialized for extracting meaning from visual versus auditory information (or vice versa), but when it comes to signaling the content of the story the brain handles visual and auditory inputs just the same.

However, just because some of our brain activity is the same as we’re reading doesn’t mean we will process and remember the information the same. Context matters. Many people choose to listen to audiobooks because they can do other things at the same time². Our attention is limited³, so when it’s split between focusing on a book and vacuuming the living room, it can impact how well we understand and remember what we’re listening to. Audiobooks also force us to read at the pace of the narrator, making it difficult to do things like slow down or re-read a sentence when our mind wanders or we didn’t understand something on a first pass. In fact, 10-25% of our eye movements while reading are backwards, allowing us to go back and make sense of things we’ve already read⁴, something that is impossible in audio-only formats.

In a classroom setting, there’s some evidence that these differences make visual or audiovisual learning better than audio alone. For example, a group of students who were asked to listen to a podcast as a homework assignment performed worse on a quiz given in class the next day than a group that was asked to read the same podcast⁵. The students who listened to the podcast reported being less likely to review sections of the podcast and felt the lack of visuals such as charts and bold or italicized text made comprehension more difficult.

But things aren’t all bad for audiobooks. When it comes to reading lighter fiction for leisure, these differences in comprehension aren’t so big. “I think there’s enormous overlap in comprehension of an audio text compared to comprehension of a print text,” Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia told Time Magazine in 2018⁶. In fact, audiobooks might be an important tool to inspire young readers. The National Literacy Trust found that 2 in 5 children or young people surveyed said that listening to audiobooks sparked their interest in reading books⁷. The same group also found that 1 in 2 children and young people surveyed said that listening to audiobooks improved their mental wellbeing by helping them relax or feel better⁷. Many people, like me, also enjoy the performance of an audiobook in which the narrator can contribute to the story by adding inflection and tone that brings characters to life. Importantly, audiobooks also offer an accessible option for people who might find audio easier than other formats, like dyslexic and blind readers.

Print versus digital

Comparing print and digital reading may seem more straightforward, but there are still important differences. For example, even though the words on the page might be the same, reading something on a tablet or computer provides far more opportunity for distraction than reading the same text in a paper book. Time we spend on screens can hurt our ability to pay attention, and reading a book on a device with notifications popping up and where we could also be scrolling on social media, playing games, or online shopping can threaten our limited attention more than reading a print book.

In one study, researchers asked 90 undergraduates to read digital and print versions of book excerpts and newspaper clippings. The students could read the digital versions on a device of their choice. They found that while the reading format didn’t impact how well students could identify the main idea of the text, students who read the texts in print recalled and understood more of the details of the reading than their peers who read them digitally⁸. This suggests that while reading digitally might be fine for leisure or skimming headlines, you’re better off reading in print when the content is dense or you want to retain more information.

Computers and smart phones are obviously very different than print books, but what about e-readers like the kindle? E-readers come with fewer distractions than other digital devices and use technology that tries to make reading on a device similar to reading on paper. To address this question, one study asked 50 participants to read a 28-page mystery story on kindle or on paper and then tested how well they remembered and engaged with the story. While the researchers found that comprehension was similar whether participants had read on paper or kindle, those who read the paper story did a better job remembering the order of events in the story than kindle readers⁹. The researchers speculate that this could be because the physical act of turning the page of a paper book (replaced by a button press to refresh a screen on a kindle) helps our brains segment the parts of a story and remember the order of events.

The big picture

At the end of the day, reading has positive impacts on both children and adults^10,11 and should be encouraged. It is my pet peeve as a reader when people debate whether listening to an audiobook “counts” as reading or is considered “cheating”. Instead, we should be encouraging reading in all its forms, especially in this age of endless distractions and dwindling attention spans. While the research I’ve presented here shows that there may be some differences between formats, especially for students looking to learn from their reading, those differences are often small and inconsistent depending on the context. The bottom line is that there is still a lot of debate in the field and there is no single answer that works for everyone. In fact, one study found that deficits in reading comprehension for digital compared to print text can be overcome with training, but only for those who state they prefer to learn from screens¹². In other words, print isn’t always better, but personal preferences and differences matter.

To all my fellow bookworms, keep on enjoying your books in whatever format works best for you.

For those who’ve made it this far, here are two of my favorite books for each format that I’ve read in the last year:

Print

1. How Fast Did T. Rex Run? Unsolved Questions from the Frontiers of Dinosaur Science by David Hone
2. Leviathan Falls by James S.A. Corey

E-Reader

1. Sand by Hugh Howey
2. The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies by Alison Goodman

Audio

1. Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto
2. Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

References

1.         Deniz, F., Nunez-Elizalde, A. O., Huth, A. G. & Gallant, J. L. The Representation of Semantic Information Across Human Cerebral Cortex During Listening Versus Reading Is Invariant to Stimulus Modality. J. Neurosci. 39, 7722–7736 (2019).

2.         Have, I. Motivations for audiobook reading in modern everyday lives. in The Digital Reading Condition (eds Stougaard Pedersen, B., Engberg, M. & Have, I.) (Routledge, London, 2022). doi:10.4324/9781003211662.

3.         Cherry, E. C. Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 25, 975–979 (1953).

4.         Weger, U. W. & Inhoff, A. W. Attention and Eye Movements in Reading: Inhibition of Return Predicts the Size of Regressive Saccades. Psychol. Sci. 17, 187–191 (2006).

5.         Daniel, D. B. & Woody, W. D. They Hear, but Do Not Listen: Retention for Podcasted Material in a Classroom Context. Teach. Psychol. 37, 199–203 (2010).

6.         Heid, M. Are Audiobooks As Good For You As Reading? Here’s What Experts Say. TIME https://time.com/5388681/audiobooks-reading-books/ (2018).

7.         Audiobooks and literacy. National Literacy Trust https://literacytrust.org.uk/information/what-is-literacy/audiobooks-and-literacy/.

8.         Singer, L. M. & Alexander, P. A. Reading Across Mediums: Effects of Reading Digital and Print Texts on Comprehension and Calibration. J. Exp. Educ. 85, 155–172 (2017).

9.         Mangen, A., Olivier, G. & Velay, J.-L. Comparing Comprehension of a Long Text Read in Print Book and on Kindle: Where in the Text and When in the Story? Front. Psychol. 10, 38 (2019).

10.       Sullivan, A. The Life-Long Benefits of Reading for Pleasure. Sch. Libr. 63, (2015).

11.       Reading Facts. The Reading Agency https://readingagency.org.uk/our-work/our-research/reading-facts/.

12.       Lauterman, T. & Ackerman, R. Overcoming screen inferiority in learning and calibration. Comput. Hum. Behav. 35, 455–463 (2014).

Cover photo by Distingué CiDDiQi on Unsplash.