It’s abundantly clear that students don’t have the time to read for hours. With audiobooks, it’s easy to see how many hours a book will take, making it the right medium for student planners packed full of courses and extracurriculars.
According to a study done by Sage Journal, audiobook comprehension is no different from reading words on pages.
Audiobooks also create opportunities to connect with literature by increasing the chance of a student listening to new works and discovering authors or cultures they aren’t familiar with. Narrators introduce life into words and grant readers the ability to effortlessly learn a foreign term or a unique name, so readers don’t have to play the pronunciation guessing-game.
Biology sophomore Nyah Marzan uses audiobooks during the school year when she doesn’t have as much time to sit and read.
“Usually, what drives me to listen to it is if the pronunciation of names and where the story setting is geographically different, like in a different country,” Marzan said. “It’s easier to grasp what’s happening and imagine and picture in my head what the setting should sound like and what it’s in.”
Just like buying from the bookstore or loaning from the library, audiobooks are available in multiple formats. Although UT libraries do not directly offer audiobooks, the University does offer electronic resources which include audio features, such as e-books with the option to have text read aloud.
Carolyn Cunningham, head of collection development at UT libraries and a social sciences librarian, encourages students to provide feedback about items they would like to see offered at UT.
“I know that people are accessing content more on their devices and not necessarily sitting at a desktop computer,” Cunningham said. “We’re trying to stay apprised of those trends.”
Shifting into adulthood, college students’ lives are filled with mundane tasks such as cooking, cleaning or running errands that are made more enjoyable with the opportunity to listen to a book on the go. Time spent getting ready to head out, driving to the store or even shopping can be turned into a several hour audiobook session.
If audiobooks are not currently a go-to form of media, consider trying it out on the next walk to class. Audiobooks are a unique yet perfect fit to the lifestyle of a college student and maybe one day the books on your “to read” list will diminish.
Washington is a Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies graduate student from Los Angeles, California.
