I 'read' most books as audio these days, primarily on Audible.

Most of us have sedentary lifestyles – I probably spend between eight to ten hours a day sitting or standing in front of a screen for work. I enjoy reading but to spend even more hours sitting in a chair reading a book has become a hard sell. Audiobooks have allowed me to 'read' while walking or exercising.

Some books work really well as audio. Most fiction and narrative non-fiction (biographies, etc.) can be listened to rather than read without much loss of detail. Some fiction is actually more enjoyable in audio. For example, the audiobook version of the classic sci-fi novel Solaris was so immersive I finished it in a single day.

It's also much easier to handle massive tomes as audio, especially when sped up to 2-2.5x. Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson spans five volumes. The four volumes that have been written so far add up to over 3000 pages. I'm unlikely to get to reading the texts any time soon. But in audio, narrated by the excellent Grover Gardner, I completed the four volumes in under 12 months. With biographies I find retention is quite good too, most of the interesting details will stick.

I try to reserve reading for books that are either 1/ not available as audiobooks or 2/ don't fit the format well. In the second category we have books that are dense and full of complex ideas (The Origin Of Species), have anachronistic language (Edward Bernays's Propaganda), or have lots of math and images (Vaclav Smil's Energy And Civilisation).

But about 90% of books will be absolutely fine in audio. And what's more, that way you can read them on your feet.