Every reader I know has a different relationship to audiobooks and I've stopped trying to have opinions about how other people should consume books. What I want to talk about is my own experience, which is mixed in productive ways.

Audiobooks work for me in two situations: when I'm walking or commuting, where the time would otherwise be empty, and when the narrator is genuinely excellent. A great narrator doesn't just read the text — they interpret it. They're making choices about rhythm, emphasis, and character voice that are sometimes different from the choices I'd make silently reading and sometimes better.

Where audiobooks fail for me is with any book that requires rereading passages. Density requires the ability to stop, reread, sit with a sentence. You can pause and rewind, but the experience is different from looking back at a page. For anything I'm reading seriously, I still want print or e-ink.