For me what tipped the scale in favor of listening to audiobooks was the 2X feature of my player, which doubles the speed of playback without increasing the pitch. Before then, audiobooks took a very, very long time to get through, which made that format relatively unattractive. Now I will often listen to audiobooks even when I could be reading the books. Another important feature of my player, which greatly increased the value of audiobooks to me, is the "skip back 30 seconds" feature.