[isaacfrond]

For a second I wasn't sure if you were sarcastic or not. Apparently the former.

Audiobooks even when sped up are still a lot slower than reading. You wouldn't ridicule someone for reading fast, would you. Reading fast is usually seen as an advantage and a sign of reading maturity.

But if you listen to a lot of audiobooks you easily learn to do it faster than normal speaking speed. I'm told that blind people, can comfortably handle 4x times normal speed.

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19241219/

[scandox]

I thinking reading fast is a sign of immaturity. When I was a teen I swallowed books whole. I absorbed sentences in a glance. But as I've got older I've slowed down. I re-read more. I choose more carefully. I get deeper into things. Fast reading is for skimming over the surface of things. Which is fine but definitely not a sign of maturity.

[glial]

I agree generally, but it depends what you're reading. There are many books that "could have been an article" -- these might not be worth reading slowly.

[throwanem]

> You wouldn't ridicule someone for reading fast, would you.

I might well, if it were evident they prioritized speed of completion over comprehension and retention of the content, and if they also insisted against all intuition and much evidence that speed of completion were the only figure of merit.

[sorokod]

The fundamental limiting factor here is not time, it's attention.

Regardless of the speed, audio books are inferior to read books because attention wanders