The phenomenon of the book that's better on audio than in print is real and worth talking about. Not 'as good in a different way' but genuinely better — the audio format realizes something the printed page can't.

Draculahas a full-cast audio production that I think is better than reading the novel. The novel is epistolary — journal entries, letters, newspaper clippings — and the format makes this seem somewhat artificial. In a full-cast audio version with multiple narrators, each character has a voice, and the epistolary form becomes what it was always pretending to be: a collection of testimonies from different perspectives.

The other example is World War Z by Max Brooks, which is structured as a series of interviews. The full-cast audio with actors including Alan Alda and Mark Hamill is a more complete realization of the novel's form than the printed text.