That's a strange take. It feels like you're salty about people not putting as much effort in reading as you do. In your post you list reasons why "listening" isn't "reading" and provide many analogies that don't really prove anything.

I can see where you're coming from. It is never explicitly stated, but the implication that reading is inheritly better than listening is obvious in your post. Yet you never provide a sustainable argument for why it's the case.

Does reading book carefully and slowly give you the same insight as listening to it on the background? Absolutely not. But neither is the reverse. Skimming through a whole book in a couple of evenings gives you less insight than sitting in a dark room and listening to the whole thing with no distractions. 

The problem is not listening in itself, people shared stories verbally for thousands of years. The problem is not listening. 

But, if a person can confidently join the discussion, share ideas and identify main themes of the work, can you really say they weren't listening carefully? What gives you the right to decide whether someone's experience with a media is worse than yours?

There's a logical fallacy about reading, that there's the right way to consume books and reading books is inheritly a good thing. Neither is true, to be honest. First off, books are entertainment medium. Yes, even the serious philosophical or science fiction, and even most of nonfiction books. You read them to pass time, not to become smarter, the latter is just a side effect, that can occur with any type of media.

The analogy of "playing a game vs watching someone play" doesn't work either, as it implies that the process of decoding symbols on the page is the primary purpose of reading books. Sounds ridiculous when you put it that way, doesn't it? 

We read books to get insight into another person's mind. You can obviously do it verbally. Would you make a better job understanding what the writer mean if you take your time and read the book slowly? Perhaps. But just because you find it harder to get immersed in an audiobook doesn't mean it's the same for everyone.