If you’re sitting on an armchair not really doing anything else, why not just read the book?
Reserve audio versions for when you genuinely can’t look at the book because you’re doing something else.
Reserve audio versions for when you genuinely can’t look at the book because you’re doing something else.
Would you also suggest to the families in the 30s & 40s that listening to the popular radio shows while sitting in the living room could have been a better experience if they had just read the transcript, instead? Or that they should have been multitasking during the shows, else it was a waste of their time?
For me, that's exactly the sort of "something else" I interpreted the previous comment to refer to.
Especially with a work like LotR it can be very tempting to skim parts; the audiobook will just continue on, which can help you encounter passages you’d normally have skipped over.
It wasn't until I had an audiobook version that I "sat through" all the poetry and tree-descriptions, and it was worth it.
The times I have just sat and listened to a well-told, well-paced story have been magical.
But the dopamine hit of reading -too quickly- competes; the pressure to "be busy" wins and makes me impatient for the spoken word by default.
The defaults are too high. I'd be better off reading less but reading more slowly, and listening sometimes.
But this is not the highest priority problem to fix, either, and I can't fix everything.
My memory works much better when I hear something than if I read it, when it comes to non technical stuff.
(see what I did there?)