Audiobooks are useful for people who are blind, people who are severely dyslexic, or people with NVD (non-verbal learning disorder), who are capable of processing sound fine, but might have difficulty processing text.

I fail to see how it's ironic, given that the original story was about a button-pressing utopia. The utopia wasn't so simplistic and purile as people having things read to them, or watching movies instead of reading, but instead, people refused to do proper research, trusting written accounts from people several times removed from the original texts, like some obscene all-encompassing version of 'telephone'. People who were, ultimately, afraid of curiosity.