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I've posted elsewhere that I consider myself as having read a particular book once I've finished the audiobook. But to say that one is reading an audiobook is just silly, IMO. If you're going to specify audiobook, then you're listening. If someone mentions the latest bestseller and you say you're reading it without mentioning medium, that's fine. But "reading" and "audiobook" disagree on a fundamental level.
I identify chips on shoulders in two camps: those who insist that listening is reading when it patently isn't and those who somehow think that audiobooks don't "count." For the life of me, I can't see why consumers of audiobooks (of which I'm one) bristle their feathers at the word "listen," when whatever is wrong with that? Nor do I see why the reading purity camp has to insist that if you've "only" heard a book, you somehow didn't experience it for the purpose of counting it or acquiring the material therein.
I think we lose useful information by fudging reading and listening to the extent that we say it's the same experience, because it isn't. The chips-on-shoulders campers refuse to coexist and worse, don't admit that each experience has its advantages relative to the other. Why would we want to lose this distinction?
It's akin to the ebooks v. pbooks contretemps, for those who insist that one is better than the other, always and in every respect. Except that it's worse, because in the real (physical) sense, listening isn't reading.
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