Every reading family runs into these questions. Does the audiobook count? Is a graphic novel real reading? She has read the same book four times, should I make her pick something new?

My short answer is that it all counts. Here is the longer one, including where the evidence runs out.

Audiobooks

One experiment tested this head on. Researchers gave 91 adults the same non-fiction text as an audiobook, as an e-text, or as both at once, then tested them. They found no statistically significant difference in how much people understood, either straight away or two weeks later.

Be careful with that. It was adults, not children. It was one book. And finding no difference in a group of 91 is not the same as proving the two are equal.

There is also something listening does not do. It does not practise decoding, the work of turning marks on a page into words. A child who is still learning to read needs print for that.

What listening clearly does do is deliver the story, the vocabulary and the ideas. For a tired kid, a reluctant reader, or a family in a car, that is a great deal.

In Readnauts audiobooks count, at a slightly lower weight than print. That weighting is our judgement, not a research finding: listening is not the same work as decoding, so we apply a small discount, not a penalty.

Rereading

This one has a lovely experiment behind it. Three-year-olds were read stories containing made-up words. Some heard the same story three times; others heard three different stories. Every child heard each new word the same number of times. The children who heard the same story again learned the words. The children who heard different stories did not.

That is a small study of very young children being read to, and it is about vocabulary, so I will not stretch it to a ten-year-old on her fourth pass through a favourite novel. But it should retire the idea that rereading is wasted time. Returning to a book is how a lot of learning happens, and it is also simply what loving a book looks like.

Readnauts notices when a reader has logged a book before, flags it as a reread, and still counts it.

Graphic novels

Here I have to be honest: I looked for research on graphic novels and reading that I could verify and stand behind, and I did not find it. So this is a position, not a finding.

Our twelve-year-old devours graphic novels. They have plots, characters, vocabulary, inference and jokes that land only if you are paying attention. They are also, often, the thing a child chooses freely, and choosing to read is the habit we are trying to protect.

In Readnauts a graphic novel is a book. Its pages count like any other pages.

What the big picture says

The broadest research we have is about print. A review of 99 studies found that how much people read and how well they read move together, more strongly at every age. Most of those studies measured books and other print, so that is where the evidence is deepest.

I take two things from that. Print matters, especially while a child is learning to read, and I would not want audiobooks to replace it. And volume matters, which means anything that keeps a child inside stories and ideas, willingly, is helping.

So count it. Count the audiobook, the comic, and the book she has read four times. The alternative is usually not a better book. It is no book.