I never bothered to, but since I've been knitting 4+ hours a day and wanting to re-read two separate series of books, Harry Potter and A Song of Ice and Fire, I finally decided to download the audiobooks.

I downloaded the Stephen Fry version of HP and listened to it all night, and I have to say, it was insanely enjoyable. It gives me warm fuzzy memories of being read to, and also doesn't make me feel like I'm wasting time re-re-re-re-reading a series of childrens books. We listened and read along to the Jim Dale version in elementary school, and I'm not really sure which voice I prefer. I'm going to stick with Stephen Fry because he's a cool guy and I want to hear the random vocabulary differences between the US and British versions, but yeah...

So...audiobooks. "Read" them?

Edit: I just realized Jim Dale was the narrator of Pushing Daisies. Squeeeee. That's why I love his voice. Now I want to switch versions.

Yes, I LOVE audiobooks . I like to read a book & then later on listen to the audio version.

Nah, it only makes me easy to doze off after a while.

^lol, me too! Ihave 2 and 1 of them I still haven't heard out, I have fallen asleep from it several times now. It's the same with radio plays and people talking in calm ways.

I've tried them but I dislike them. Just isn't the same.

Nope. I'm old school.

I prefer reading them. I've never been able to pay attention to audio books.

Lots of people seem to prefer audiobooks to reading physical books. I was going to attempt to listen to The Dying Earth and Lyonesse audiobooks that I've had on my computer for ages but that probably wouldn't have been such a good idea considering that:

. My mind wanders a lot, even when reading physical books. I often find myself going back to re-read stuff. With an audiobook, this would be a huge pain. I'd have to get up to go back a few minutes in Foobar to re-listen to stuff I wasn't able to fully ingest due to my mind wandering.

. Jack Vance has a massive vocabulary which contains words that the average (or non-average) person would have never come across before. It doesn't help that he also throws in made-up words that look real a lot of the time as well.

I've since deleted the Lyonesse audiobooks as I just received an omnibus containing the trilogy, and I'm getting a Dying Earth omnibus in the mail soon, but I'm still somewhat tempted to listen to at least one of the Dying Earth books in audiobook format to see what it's like to listen to an audio book. I've been dying to read the Dying Earth series, particularly the second novel in the series called The Eyes of the Overworld and might end up listening to at least one of the novels once I'm finished reading the first book in the Lyonesse trilogy. The Eyes of the Overworld audiobook is 8 hours long which probably wouldn't be that bad to sit through. The book sounds absurd, but in a good way:



After reading Lyonesse for a while and loving it thus far, I know I'll have to find a lot more Jack Vance books. Some of his books are bloody difficult to find. For example, some of his books can't even be found on Ebay and everyone knows that you can find pretty much anything on there.

I remembered this audiobook topic but figured that I was the one who created it. Didn't think it was Rezu who created it. Harry Potter and other juvenile fiction probably wouldn't be too bad to listen to in audiobook format, but an audiobook where the reader is constantly spewing out not-so-common words could be a little tough to follow. I like building up my vocabulary when I read so that I can strengthen my reading comprehension; an audiobook wouldn't allow me to do this.

By the way: If anyone wants those Dying Earth audiobooks, let me know. Some of you might be interested in them.

AUDIOBOOKS ARE EVIL! They're a literal retelling of the entire story based on differences between my personal preferences developed while reading any given book, eg. speed, imagery, mood, tone, pronunciation, and those adapted by the random voices used... If I listen to some bastard reading aloud to me, it destroys all such possible idiosyncrasies, for the time being disconnecting me completely from anything pleasurable having remotely to do with said story.

Or in other words, I like my books kept to myself.

I might listen to an audio book if it was read by the author. I've always liked listening to poets read their own work. It gives it a whole new dimension.
I think for something that's not just straight fiction, an audio book read by the author might be interesting since you can hear the way they choose to emphasize certain things. I have downloaded a few audio books written/read by David Foster Wallace but I haven't gotten around to listening to them.

I've listened to a couple Bill Bryson audiobooks, which I really liked,

But for fiction I'd rather read it, it's just I'm not the best at reading stuff out loud in my head, so I really enjoyed listening to those,
I would put my headphones on, close my eyes and it's like I'm in another world, which is great for stuff like car journeys where reading makes me travel sick

But I also really like some radio shows, some of which in a way are kinda like audiobooks which they didn't make books off