Reading it or listening to it
The comparison people actually make is not between two editions — it is between reading and listening, which are different activities. One asks for attention you may not currently have. The other keeps going whether or not you are following.
What each activity does
Six differences that matter for this book specifically, rather than for books generally.
Self-paced by default. When a sentence lands, your eyes stop on it without you deciding — and that pause is doing real work on the chapters that describe you.
Keeps moving unless you intervene. Which is a weakness on the difficult passages and a strength on the flat ones.
Stalls. You can spend a fortnight on chapter three and never get to four.
Does not stall. Narration walks you past the chapter you would have avoided, and you find yourself at chapter nine.
Requires concentration, which is one of the first things a difficult month removes.
Requires very little. Frequently the only edition that gets used in a bad stretch, which is not a small advantage.
The prompt sits there on the page, visibly unanswered.
The prompt is read aloud and then gone. This is where audio-only readers most often lose the value.
Rereading a paragraph is instant.
Finding a passage again means scrubbing through a chapter. Bookmarks help and are not the same as search.
Six hours of reading is genuinely six hours of effort.
Six hours thirteen minutes, or about four ten at 1.5×, and it can happen while walking.
Which to choose, by current capacity
Not by preference. By what you can actually sustain this month.
The questions this raises
Including whether audio counts as having read it.
Is the audiobook the full text?
Yes — unabridged, all thirty chapters, six hours thirteen minutes, narrated by Dale A. Cuilla. Nothing is condensed and the prompts are read in full.
Does listening count as reading it?
For comprehension the research broadly finds them comparable. For this book the difference is not comprehension — it is whether the written prompts get answered, and that is a matter of habit rather than of format.
Which is better for retention?
Print, marginally, mostly because of the automatic pauses. The gap closes almost entirely if you write three lines from memory after each chapter — there is a page on this site about exactly that.
Can I switch between them?
People do. Check what the current listings offer at purchase, since the arrangements between editions change.
What about the ebook?
A third option with its own trade-offs — searchable, private, readable in the dark. There is a separate comparison of ebook against audiobook on this site, and the formats hub puts all four side by side.
Which gets finished more often?
Audio, in the periods that matter most. A print book bought during a good month and abandoned during a bad one is the most common outcome of all.