[danenania]

I like both paper and audio books, but for me I generally feel a bit less engaged with audio, I think, for a couple reasons.

One is that someone else is deciding on the pacing. With paper books, I tend to take a lot more pauses to think things over or savor something particularly insightful, dramatic, funny, or what-have-you in the story. I could just pause the audio for the same effect, but there seems to be an inertia when someone else is reading that stops me from doing it as often.

Second is that it's a lot easier with audio to pay less than full attention. If I realize I haven't been fully listening for some period of time, either because of an external distraction or because my mind has gone off on some tangent, I'm less likely to go back because of the annoyance of trying scrub back to the exact location where I tuned out. This creates a tendency to shrug it off and keep going, which adds up to a lower level of absorption overall.

With a physical book, it's much easier to backtrack and re-read sections, and I'm a lot less likely to zone out in the first place since I have to actively read each sentence. Of course, sometimes I do realize that I've been visually 'reading' a paragraph or two while my mind is actually somewhere else, but I seem to snap out of it a lot quicker with a physical book than with audio, and it only takes a second to jump back up the page and re-read (much quicker than finding my exact point of departure in the audio).