[sun surfer]

Mine has changed over time. I've been listening to audiobooks a few years now. I of course started out listening on normal speed, then found I could speed them up and listen to them faster. I can't remember the speed options on iTunes/Nano at the time but I'm pretty sure I just went to the fastest. It sounded so much faster (the voices got squeaky like chipmunks) but I think it was only at like 1.25 or some such. I remember thinking I was listening to it at twice the speed at first and so happy I'd be getting through books twice as fast, but I came down from that cloud real quickly! Though, once I adjusted my expectations it was still nice getting through books a little faster anyway.

Then, I started listening to audiobooks while doing other more mentally tasking things, and I went the opposite way - slowing them down below normal speed so I could still multitask more often. By this time I'd given up using iTunes and Nanos for audiobooks and just started using the Audible app on my mobile. A little harder to keep on while exercising and listening, but it was one less device to have to keep track of, and less work to get the audiobooks onto my device of choice (a simple tap of a button on the same device I listen to it on, rather than three separate transfers before - downloading it from Audible to my computer, then transferring it to iTunes and authenticating, then plugging up the Nano and transferring it to the device). Honestly I stopped using my Nano when I started using music streaming services because I needed the smartphone for that, so without being able to use my Nano for music, using it for audiobooks alone was too cumbersome. I do still miss how light it was though, but I digress.

Anyway, then I just started to tire a bit of listening to audiobooks with sloths reading them. So, now I've drifted back to listening to audiobooks on normal speed. I don't know if it will stick but currently I do like hearing books being read in a 'normal' voice. Listening to chipmunks or sloths read is okay for awhile, but eventually it wears on me!

But I know there's people who do prefer audiobooks on non-'normal' speeds, so what's yours? Since it's not discussed much I'm actually really curious as I have no idea how popular speeding up or slowing down audiobooks is.