Over the past decade, the way we enjoy novels, non-fictions and biographies has changed dramatically, with ebooks and audiobooks challenging the dominance of the printed books. But what is the exact difference between ebook and audiobook, and which one is better? There are a lot of pros and cons on both sides. As per my experience with ebooks and audiobooks, here I tried to list out the main supporting factors on both sides of ebooks vs audiobooks as 5 main reasons one is better than the other.
See Also: E-Book vs Printed Book: Which One is Better?
Part 1. 5 Reasons Why Audiobooks Are Better than Ebooks
1. Multitasking
As long as you are not focused on a task that requires you to pay too much attention, you can always do multitasking while listening to audiobooks. Whether you are doing household chores, cleaning, cooking meals, or driving on your daily commute, there is no question that audiobooks help busy readers read more.
2. Pronunciation
Have you ever been in such a situation in which you don't know how to read and pronounce new words when you are reading a book? This is a very common phenomenon for reading books. But this will never be a problem for audiobooks. The narrator of the audiobook reads everything to you, thus tells you how to pronounce the words. It is also a huge benefit especially for kids.
3. Visual Benefit
Naturally, audiobooks don’t require you to look at the book and actually read it. This is a huge advantage because you can listen to an audiobook while you’re doing almost anything. Compared with ebooks which will cause eye-strain, audiobooks are the first choice for those who have poor eyesight.
4. Better Comprehension
Listening to an audiobook and reading the ebook version are two different paths that lead to the same destination. However, When you read an ebook, you are just looking at symbols and you may not totally absorb the information. However, when you're listening to the audiobook, you are much more likely to extract the gist of what someone meant when the narrator reads to you in an emotional tone.
5. Enjoyment
For a lot of readers, the main purpose of listening to audiobooks is for enjoyment. What does it mean? People enjoy hearing a voice telling stories to them. With audiobooks, people are allowed to multitask while listening to a story. For example, while traveling, audiobooks enable us to escape from boredom.
Bonus Tips -- Listen to Audible on Any Device without Limitations
As the largest audiobook producer and retailer in the world, Amazon Audible includes over 200,000 best-selling digital audiobooks. However, the biggest weakness is that all Audible audiobooks are DRM-protected in AAX format. Although Audible provides some apps for Android/iOS phones to listen to audiobooks, you cannot listen to Audible with a portable MP3 player, with any device you like, or in the car. To listen to Audible audiobooks on any device without limitations, you will need a tool called Epubor Audible Converter - the best Audible Converter to help you convert Audible audiobooks to MP3.
Guide [Official Method] Convert Audible to MP3 with Audible Converter
Part 2. 5 Reasons Why Ebooks Are Better than Audiobooks
1. Cost-effective
In most cases, an audiobook is more expensive than an ebook version of the same book. Ebooks are cheap to produce and distribute for authors and publishers. Therefore, readers can typically purchase these books at a considerable price from audiobook versions. In addition, free ebook download sites are much more than free audiobook download sites. If you like to read ebooks, you will spend less money.
2. Highlight & Bookmarking
Highlighting and bookmarking is really easy with ebooks in an eReader, tablet, or an ebook reading app. It is also easy to scroll through the book to find your highlights and even export the notes. This is a huge plus for ebooks. Although you can bookmark a section in Audible, it's still not nearly as good as if you have an ebook to highlight.
3. Availability
In terms of availability, ebooks are the winner. As of today, there are more and more book titles coming with an ebook version, which you can purchase and download on the web. However, compared with ebooks, audiobooks need to be first produced by the narrators, so there are still very limited titles that have an audiobook version. In most cases, you can find an ebook for a title on the internet, but not the audiobook.
4. Easy to Store
Most of the ebooks need less internal storage than audiobooks. Take an 8 GB Kindle Paperwhite as an example - a typical book size (texts only) is about 1 MB, which means you can store 8000 such books in an 8 GB Kindle. Some ebooks may be larger than 1MB, but it still should be able to hold 2000 to 3000 books easily. How about audiobooks? An Audible audiobook can take 50 times more space than an ebook edition. That is to say, you can only store about 160 audiobooks in a 8GB Kindle. That is the reason why we often say we can carry thousands of ebooks in a simple device, but never for audiobooks.
5. Focus
As I mentioned above, we often listen to audiobooks while we are doing multitasking at the same time, which means that we're more likely to be distracted by those tasks. But while reading ebooks, we must focus our attention, and we often immerse ourselves in the book content. In this regard, if you are about to learn something, ebooks are a better choice than audiobooks.
Bonus Tips -- Read Ebooks on Any Device without Limitations
The greatest disadvantage of ebooks is that almost all the ebooks purchased from the popular ebook stores are DRM-protected, including Kindle, Kobo, Google Play, Nook and more. It means they are not truly owned by you. For example, you cannot freely share them with your friends, or read them on any device - you can't read Kindle books on your Kobo/Nook device, or vice versa. To get real ownership of what you've paid, you should remove the DRM from such ebooks. Epubor Ultimate is the best eBook DRM Removal and eBook Converter which will help you decrypt your Kindle/Kobo/Google Play/Nook books and convert the ebook format. Never miss out this tool to liberate your ebooks.
Guide How to Remove eBook DRM with Epubor Ultimate
Michelle loves technology & reading very much. She seeks the methods to enjoy eBooks and audiobooks more freely and wants to share everything new she has got with you.
