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I generally read audiobooks at 1.5x because 1.0 seems terribly slow to me. This more or less matches my reading pace for printed books, so 16 hours seems right.

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1.0 is so slow that I wonder if they record the narrator, then slow them down by a third. It's much slower than people talk.

If I am doing something else while listening, it helps to have it slow down a bit. Maybe that's why audiobooks slow it down from the get go.

Not everyone is native English speaker, and slow pace allows you to get immersed. That people want 1,5 speed or do two things at same time is a sign of our time (appropriate content is cheap snd widely available but we don't have more available leisure time). Society doesn't want people have abundant leisure time, hence 'Bullshit Jobs'.

I slow down some narrators and speed up others because I like content delivered at a specific speed. Leisure time is a reason, but not the only reason.

I'm not a native English speaker either. The thing here is that audiobooks are quite a bit slower than normal speech, which is what we've been trained on all our lives.

People want 1.5 speed because that's what gets the narrator back to a normal speaking speed.

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