The word that always shows up in this conversation is cheating. If they listen instead of reading, that’s cheating. If all they pick up is graphic novels, that’s cheating. If the type is huge, it’s a baby book.
It is worth looking at what the evidence says about each one, because it points in different directions.
Format is the cheapest of ten reasons someone won’t read to change: one library loan and one afternoon. There are four ways out, and this piece sorts them by what is actually known about each — including the one half the internet recommends and the studies argue against.
Do audiobooks count as reading?
For understanding a story, one study says yes. Adults were split into three groups: one read a book on a tablet, one listened to it, one did both at once. In the words of Beth Rogowsky, who ran it: “What we found is it didn’t matter whether these adults read the book from an e-tablet, listened to an audio version of the book, or did both simultaneously, comprehension was equal” (Tech & Learning).
Now the limit, which comes from the same person and almost never travels beside the finding. Those participants were 91 college-educated adults: readers who were already made. About children still learning, Rogowsky warns: “That becomes an issue when instead of teaching our students how to read, we’re letting them just listen to audiobooks for longer periods of time, especially in our English classes.”
Together the two sentences give the real advice, and it beats either one alone:
- Audio does the story. Understanding, following a plot, meeting characters, picking up vocabulary, wanting to know what happens next. It works there.
- Decoding gets practised by decoding. That needs eyes on letters, even a few short ones.
So audio earns its place for what it is, and reading practice happens separately, in small doses. The audiobook in the car and two pages out loud at bedtime are two different things, and both fit in the same week.
What if they only want graphic novels?
Then they read. Mexico’s national statistics institute counts comics, graphic novels and manga among the reading materials it measures, alongside books: 20.9% of literate people aged twelve and over read them in 2025 (MOLEC 2025).
And what happens inside is more than it looks. A graphic novel asks the reader to follow a sequence, hold characters in mind, infer what happened in the gap between two panels, and read tone off a drawn face. That inference between panels is comprehension work of the good kind.
What is worth checking here is the definition being used at home. When a child hears that their thing doesn’t count, they learn two things at once: that reading is boring, and that they are bad at it.
Do dyslexia fonts actually help?
This is the recommendation this piece makes in the other direction, and it is worth knowing before downloading anything.
An experiment tested the OpenDyslexic font with twelve students with dyslexia, grades 3 through 6, against Arial and Times New Roman. The finding: “no improvement in reading rate or accuracy for individual students with dyslexia, as well as the group as a whole.” On accuracy it was worse: it “produced negative results, or decreased students’ outcomes compared to both Arial and TNR, on all three reading tasks.” And nobody preferred it: “while some students commented that the font was ‘new’ or ‘different’, none of the participants reported preferring to read material presented in that font” (Annals of Dyslexia, 2016).
Twelve participants is a small sample, and that deserves saying. What holds the argument up is the direction of the effect plus the absence of any preference. A later study of another font of the same kind found no benefit either.
What does help, and costs nothing. What relieves a dense page has little to do with the shape of the letters:
| What to change | Why it works |
|---|---|
| Larger type | Less effort per character, and the eye jumps less |
| More space between lines | The single biggest help for not losing the line |
| Shorter lines | The return to the left margin lands more often |
| Wider margins, less text per page | Less page at once, and a sense of progress |
| Matte paper instead of glossy | No glare scattering the letters |
On an e-reader all of that adjusts in thirty seconds, and it outperforms any branded typeface.
What does a picture book do that a chapter book doesn’t?
It shares the work. In a picture book the image carries half the story, so the reader holds less text to get the same amount of story.
Families drop the format early because “they’re too old for that.” And there goes a format that holds nine- and ten-year-olds perfectly well when the text is good. A picture book with a serious story, read at ten, is a different object from the same book at four.
If the question is about length, here are three things you can measure with the book in your hands.
How to test a format in one week
Without buying anything. Library, loan, one week per format:
| Format | What to try | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Graphic novel | One from a long series | Whether they ask for the next one |
| Picture book | One with a real story in it | Whether they stop on a page to look |
| Audiobook | In the car, or while they draw | Whether they ask what happened next |
| Large print | The same title they already abandoned | Whether they get past page ten this time |
That last row is the cleanest test there is: same text, different presentation. If large print gets them moving, the page was the problem.
Where to start
This week, borrow one format that has not been tried at home yet. Public libraries lend children’s audiobooks, and that is the cheapest way to find out whether the ear is the route in your house.
In the meantime, a story holds up read aloud without buying anything: the guide to writing a story at home works read out loud, which is how stories get finished.
And if changing format changes nothing, there are nine more causes in the ten reasons.
Where these numbers come from
- Rogowsky, Calhoun and Tallal, “Does Modality Matter? The Effects of Reading, Listening, and Dual Modality on Comprehension,” SAGE Open, 2016. Rogowsky quoted by Tech & Learning. Source
- Wery, Jessica J. and Diliberto, Jennifer A., “The effect of a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, on reading rate and accuracy,” Annals of Dyslexia 67(2), 2016. Source
- INEGI, Módulo sobre Lectura (MOLEC) 2025, press release 143/25. Source
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