[fjtorres]

Some people *love* being read to.
Others love the convenience of audiobooks, especially the digital ones they can listen to while jogging, exercising, puttering about the house, even driving.
For the time-constrained or the dyslexic they are a godsend.
Ditto for good quality, modern, TTS. Which, BTW, has gotten very, very good.
It'll never get quite as good as a good human reader (without an "Inflexion Markup Language standard) but for many it will suffice.
I've only done audiobooks once or twice but I don't see anything wrong or degraded about them.
And graphic novels, even western ones, come in many flavors.
Some are in the vein of highly illustrated text novels while others are more like print movies. Either way, the narrative depth and prose quality can be every bit as good as the best narrative text story or as bad as the worst cliche.

Sturgeon's law applies everywhere.