Seems we're fairly divided here between "audiobooks are for fiction" and "they work great as learning resource".
How about a slight tangent / challenge: Try to give a few examples of "which" audiobooks/podcasts/lectures are in Your own personal Top 3 or so (and maybe why).
My personal kickoff (I'm mostly in the fiction / "I need narrative" camp):
1. "The Poet's Corner" by John Lithgow (narrated by himself). This book probably converted me to even prefer audiobooks over regular paper / ebooks. Lithgow is a wonderful actor and in case of poetry, interpretation matters as much as the text itself. And the selection of different actors he brings in would be hard to beat even if it was done by a major Hollywood studio.
2. Bobiverse by Dennis E. Taylor, narrated by Ray Porter. If You like SF and haven't yet tried anything that's been narrated by Porter, please do yourself a favor and check his name out. I'll wait. The list is worth it.
3. Postwar by Tony Judt, narrated by Ralph Cosham. This one convinced me that what I need in an audiobooks is a narrative, but it does not necessarily need to be fiction. I'm a bity of a history nerd and reading one of the major works of 20th century in an audio form was the final straw that convinced me that audiobooks work great even for some non-fiction cases.
Basically, whenever I see I have a chunk of 30+ minutes of time when I "can" get away with running on autopilot and devoting part of my attention to listening (in my case - whenever I am cycling / running training, commutes, highway driving etc.), I now have the option of reading at the same time.
2) Comedian’s autobiography self-preformed (Martin Short, Guy Brannan, Trevor Noah and Jerry Seinfeld)
3) A Life in Parts,
Bryan Cranston
Sometimes I listen to an audiobook for a few chapters to hear the author’s “voice” and then start the print version from the beginning. A writer for whom this isn’t necessary? Garrison Keillor whose distinctive voice I can hear at-will and who writes exactly as he speaks.
I'm glad to hear that "Postwar" by Judt has a great audio recording, as I've read that the is book highly recommended by academic historians. This puts it next on my listening list (other books on my list about the 20th Century include "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes and "Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze" by Harmsen).
I'm struggling to think of a top three list from audiobooks alone in terms of memorability and enjoyment, but I can list a few that had a measurable impact on my life.
1. "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" by Haruki Murakami, narrated by Ray Porter (coincidentally, also the narrator for the Bobiverse book you mentioned). This was a major influence of increasing my running volume and moving on to a more intense intermediate middle-distance program, and his experiences also gave me the motivation to push through discomfort in running and certain parts of life when necessary (with the ideas that "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional," and that even world-class elite runners have days when they don't feel like training, but they go out and do so anyway).
2. "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, narrated by Sissy Spacek. This reading wasn't required by my school growing up, but I've wanted to read this book for several years due to its great reputation. The audiobook version helped me finally enjoy the book over a month or so. I still remember Atticus Finch's quote that "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view [...] until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it," and the idea helped navigate through some complicated negotiations and social situations at various times.
3. Various other classics (sneaking a bit around the limit of a top three). The audiobook version of Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" was an influence that led to an increased interest with space exploration and astronomy, and readings of Huxley's "Brave New World" and Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" helped me better appreciate the damaging effects of excessive escapism with entertainment, versus choosing efforts that require more struggle and difficulty.
I've also become more informed through listenings to Carreyrou's "Bad Blood" about the fall of Theranos, and Quinones's "Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic," though classic literature has interestingly been typically more relevant to my day-to-day life than non-fiction books so far, with the exception of certain memoirs such as Murakami's.
How about a slight tangent / challenge: Try to give a few examples of "which" audiobooks/podcasts/lectures are in Your own personal Top 3 or so (and maybe why).
My personal kickoff (I'm mostly in the fiction / "I need narrative" camp):
1. "The Poet's Corner" by John Lithgow (narrated by himself). This book probably converted me to even prefer audiobooks over regular paper / ebooks. Lithgow is a wonderful actor and in case of poetry, interpretation matters as much as the text itself. And the selection of different actors he brings in would be hard to beat even if it was done by a major Hollywood studio.
2. Bobiverse by Dennis E. Taylor, narrated by Ray Porter. If You like SF and haven't yet tried anything that's been narrated by Porter, please do yourself a favor and check his name out. I'll wait. The list is worth it.
3. Postwar by Tony Judt, narrated by Ralph Cosham. This one convinced me that what I need in an audiobooks is a narrative, but it does not necessarily need to be fiction. I'm a bity of a history nerd and reading one of the major works of 20th century in an audio form was the final straw that convinced me that audiobooks work great even for some non-fiction cases.
Basically, whenever I see I have a chunk of 30+ minutes of time when I "can" get away with running on autopilot and devoting part of my attention to listening (in my case - whenever I am cycling / running training, commutes, highway driving etc.), I now have the option of reading at the same time.