I understand but don't agree.

'customer' implies commerce happened, 'listener' implies listening happened. 'consumer' is a higher abstraction than either of those.

It's the most abstract word someone could think of to say "X internalized Y".

e.g. "X took Y and added it to itself... let's not get distracted with how. the important thing is, X took Y and internalized it."

I guess we could, uh, go with "internalizer". I'd be down with that.

> 'consumer' is a higher abstraction than either of those

In the old days, we called those people the "audience".

What your audience hopefully does with your work is "learn" or "be entertained".

Perhaps beneficiary but that may be a bridge too far

But you don't consume content, that's meaningless. When you consume something, it is used up and disappears entirely.

Your context is backwards. The context is me not the thing.

You're thinking "Book + Me = Book + Me" but in the context of me it's...

  Me + Food = Me with more nutrients.
  Me + Book = Me with more knowledge.

In that context, post-consumption, the state of the book becomes irrelevant (destroyed or not, it doesn't matter, I still got what I wanted from it). I absorbed the knowledge (or nutrients). Brought it into my body and made it part of me.

Not that it matters much, but under your interpretation, the better wording would be "ingesting". And interestingly, that word doesn't have the same problem as "consuming", which is that content peddlers devalue the reader by implying they are consuming their merchandise.

I like ingest!

That said, I believe OP is offended at being referred to in an impersonal way. As such, I don't believe there's much to be done for him beyond "don't refer to people by their actions", which is impractical.

"I ingested [The Sandlot]" or "We had 50,000 ingesters of [The Sandlot] this week!"

are, to my mind, faaaaaairly equivalent to

"I consumed [The Sandlot]" or "We had 50,000 consumers of [The Sandlot] this week!"

Not terribly compelling but... "ingest" has a gut association whilst "consume" has a head connotation... so... there's that.

However, there is a fun distinction between the two. "Consuming" a book, to me, just implies you read it. "Digesting" and "ingesting" have implications of /rumination/.