I love audiobooks. I can essentially 'read' while I drive or while I'm cleaning up the house or doing any other menial task that doesn't divide my attention too much. I have read a
ton of books building Gunplay over the last couple of years.
The only downsides to them are that you hae to read at someone else's pace and that, sometimes, the readers are poorly directed and don't use proper pronunciation of certain words, especially in fantasy and sci-fi settings.
I use Audible and Overdrive, myself. Audible is good for
most things in terms of access and availability. Some of the prices are great. I bought Miyamoto Musashi's
Book of Five Rings for less than a buck. And I bought
Common Sense by Thomas Payne for, like, four bucks.
Overdrive is great because it links up to my library and I have access to their entire catalogue. That was how I recently read both
1984 and
Watership Down, which are, in my opinion, two of the greatest fucking books of all time. Honestly, if you read books and you
haven't read these, you should probably be High Sparrowed for it.
The downside to Overdrive is that you only have limited access to the books. After a set time period, you can't listen to the book. The reason for this is tied to licensing-the library would have to pay a fee for every digital copy of the book they loan out, so on some titles they're rather scarce on availability. But when I went on Audible, I could only find a German read of
Watership Down.
I only do unabridged, and that's because the author's craft is important to me. This may sound a little opinionated but I'm too old to give a fuck.
If you're going to read a book, read the whole goddamned book. Knowing the events of a story and experiencing it are two different things. If the author wanted you to simply 'know what happens', they wouldn't bother writing books. They'd just write shitty blogs telling you about their wonderful ideas.
Suffer through the parts you think are slow and try to understand why those passages are like this. It's exposure to culture, so fucking culture yourself.