"Reading an audiobook" doesn't sound right to me either, but I don't ever remember the discussion parameters being clearly limited to that one aspect.
My point is that I don't think anyone is
entitled to any semantic clarification as to how others "take in a book." In the context of "
did you read book X by author Y?", then a "
yes" is sufficient regardless of how the words of book X were experienced.
As far as being bothered by the marketing phrase "listening is the new reading" merely because listening is not the same thing as reading
semantically; well
of course they're not semantically the same thing. That's not what the marketing phrase is trying to imply. Much like no one is implying that orange and black are the same colors in "Orange is the New Black." Conflating disparate things is the point. It's snark in its purest sense.
Among literate people taking in a story, it's OK for "reading" and "listening" to get a little slippery with each other. No one will die and no languages will be harmed.
