Well, it's great for multi-tasking - like when I'm doing some mind-numbing work on the edit, shuffling dots around for hours, I can listen to it and the time passes by nicely. I also have quite a good visual imagination and since when I'm listening, the visual part of the brain isn't occupied, I can vividly imagine those events as if I was watching a movie, so that's pretty cool :-)

I definitely prefer the narrator to do straightforward reading rather than change voices and stuff. And I hate when they add sound effects and music, which in the SW audio books is unfortunately quite common. Luckily the Thrawn Trilogy unabridged audio books fall into the first category - I have them digitized from audio cassettes, so I'm not sure if they ever came out in any other format.