> It's just surprising that audiobook listeners haven't developed a distinct taste apart from book readers.

Sample size of 1, but: my taste in audiobooks does not perfectly overlap with my taste in dead-trees books. My audiobook library skews much more to the fiction end of things, while my dead-trees library contains more nonfiction. I also use audiobooks to re-read books I've already read.

I enjoy the performance aspect of the audiobooks in its own right. The narrator makes or breaks my experience of the book, to such an extent that I have returned Audible books that _I have already read in dead-trees form and knew I liked_ because the narration was bad. I also suspect some of my favorite audiobooks would have ended up in the "donate/throw out" pile if I'd read them first on paper.