[1bent]

I think of audiobooks as a very different form from books; I read lots of books, but listen to almost no audiobooks, though I've bought a few, and have listened to my favourite, Spider Robinson reading a collection of Heinlein short stories, a few times.

For me, books allow me to listen (with my mind's inner voice) to the author's voice directly; a human's dramatic performance gets between my imagination and the author.

When I want to enjoy hands- and eyes-free reading, I turn on TTS in my ebook-reading app; the mechanical, robotic voice doesn't get between me and the author. It's more like reading with my eyes.

Back before Android, I'd use flite (Festival Lite, a simple, single-file, pure-C spinoff of the Festival TTS research project) to convert a few books from txt to wav, then to ogg, and load them on an iRiver before a long drive.

I do like Librivox as a recommendation service; there's a lot of books in Project Gutenberg, but the ones that get to Librivox had one or more volunteers who thought that book worth the time and effort to read aloud.