Is ‘immersive reading' the ideal new way to experience books?
If your lasting image of The White Lotus, Mike White's serialized travelogue about the titular luxury resort, was one of murder, romance, betrayal or intrigue, then you may have missed one of the subtler character portrayals at the series' onset.
Piper Ratliff, a college student whose interest in Buddhism has brought her wealthy southern family on a trip to Thailand, reads on the boat ride into the resort. Much has been speculated on White's literary choices for the characters – in a LitHub interview props master Michael Cory describes books as getting 'right into either who people are or who they want to be.'
But what was notable about Piper's reading choices wasn't the particular spiritual screeds Piper was reading so much as how she was reading them: simultaneously with an audiobook, otherwise known as 'immersive reading' (and occasionally 'immersion reading').
What does how people read say about who they are, or who they want to be?
The market for audiobooks is on a rapid rise; Global Newswire predicts what was a US$7.21-billion industry in 2024 will reach US$8.32-billion in 2025 and US$17.18-billion by 2030. Now, readers are using their audiobooks to follow along with the same text.
The phenomenon has been making waves on 'BookTok,' the literary subcommunity on TikTok. 'It adds to the feeling of watching a movie in your head,' says BookTokker Sarah Jenkins (@sarahjenkinsxo) about trying immersive reading in a video that has more than 37,000 likes.
'I don't want to read a book any other way,' the user behind @whereismylibrarycard, a bookfluencer, says in her introductory video to the trend. 'Especially for all my ADHD readers, my easily distracted readers, you need to hop on this.' Her post has more than 20,100 likes and over 500 comments, some of them from users agreeing with her and sharing tips on how to find the best accompanying audio versions.
Tech companies have jumped on the trend too: Microsoft offers an immersive reader feature that allows users to customize text by colour and spacing for a 'comfortable and easy-to-process experience'; Apple Books has a Read Aloud feature; and there are apps available that convert text to speech (Speechify, for one, allows the text to be narrated in your own voice or even that of your favourite celebrity).
The introduction of technology to help with literacy is hardly new; Robert Savage, the dean of the faculty of education at York University, has spent the better part of his career researching children's early reading and finding technologies to improve literacy. 'There's a place for technology,' he says. 'I think anything that gets people reading is a good thing.'
Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, where he applies the principles of cognitive psychology to education, cautions that immersive reading has not been proven to offer any particular benefits.
'When I first came across the literature on [immersive reading] five or six years ago, it was not a promising technique,' he says. 'The thinking was, this will provide some support to struggling readers. The reason it didn't really work is that readers just don't read the text. They've got a way of opting out.'
Moreover, the audio component means that reading is no longer what psychologists call a 'self-paced' task. There are moments while reading when one needs to backtrack, to revisit sticky syntax or a difficult sentence, which becomes more difficult to do while toggling between audio and text formats.
Want to read more books? There's an app for that – but there's a catch
Willingham is not opposed to audiobooks as a whole; in fact, he says, the process by which we digest audio content engages the same mental processes as reading comprehension.
One might even benefit from what linguists call prosody, that is, the intonational phrasing of a text read aloud, which can enhance our understanding (or why so many high-school teachers wisely insist on reciting Shakespeare). But because the audio format makes it difficult to readily backtrack, and easy to drift off, Willingham recommends saving it for easy, leisurely reading.
'If immersive reading is capturing an audience of people who haven't read in a long time, then, as someone who loves reading, I think that's marvellous,' he says. 'But if it's used by people who are supposed to be reading and practising that effort of creating a world, then it's obviously not so marvellous.'
So I tried to read immersively. I opened a chapter of my novel and set an audiobook to 1.5 speed before bed one night, and indeed, it felt quite frictionless. A soothing British voice corrected my mental pronunciation of the Italian names I had never encountered before, adapted something of a falsetto to indicate female spoken dialogue and spoke with a compelling drawl that stopped me from drifting off.
But this movie that the narrator created for me, while pleasant, was ever slightly so different from the scenes I had previously imagined, which was replete with its own voices and cadence. I felt the experience robbed me of what is most special about reading a novel; that it took all that is challenging in a text and sloughed off the bumps so that it was as smooth and nutritiously deficient as a gumball.
'If I'm reading visually, then it's 100 per cent up to me to create that world,' says Willingham. 'If I'm listening, I'm getting someone else's interpretation of it.'
It reminded me of using ChatGPT, and so I asked Savage about the attendant decline in reading comprehension that has reportedly accompanied the uptick in the use of AI.
'We can be a bit reliant on technologies, and they can take away capacities that we might otherwise have,' says Savage. 'It's a balance. We don't want to be endlessly practising things that are obsolete. On the other hand, we don't want to be so dependent on technologies that we can't think. These are complex days, and we don't have simple answers to these kinds of big questions.'
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