Over the past couple of years, I've developed something of a passion for audiobooks.

This first stemmed from a desire to find something that might make my afternoon work (academic copy editing) less monotonous. While it might help to pay the rent a little more than writing, copy editing isn't exactly the most riveting of occupations. The initial formatting part, especially, can be mind numbing - or at least, it used to be. Since my discovery of the BBC 7 radio station, however, changing Cambridge professors' references into house style and checking "s" and "z" suffixes has come to seem less a necessary chore than a voluntary hobby.

Thanks to BBC 7 - which bills itself as "unadulterated entertainment" and, as the BBC's bookworm channel, offers a series of differently-themed reading "hours" throughout the day - my working afternoons, once such a pain, have been brightened by the likes of Susan Hill's The Woman in Black, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, William Thackeray's Vanity Fair ... BBC 7 has come up with the goods time after time, both in terms of its perfectly-toned readers and its selection of some fantastic books.

(The programmers also slot in various pieces of non-fiction, and one of the best readings I've heard so far has got to be John Mortimer's Murderers and Other Friends. Mortimer's description of a meeting with Robert Graves - who told him that "Jesus Christ lived to the age of 80, went to China and discovered spaghetti" - had me laughing for days. "In which gospel," a fellow guest puzzled, "do we learn that Jesus Christ discovered spaghetti?" "In no gospel," came Graves's reply: "It's simply a matter of common knowledge." Graves also stated that Mortimer's first play would flourish because he - Graves - was helping it along with a magic stone. The play, unfortunately, bombed.)

A measure of the extent of my conversion to spoken word readings has been that, although this year I've been based in the US, on the road a great deal and therefore out of reach of BBC 7, I haven't been able to do without my audio fix. Fortunately, a timely subscription to Audible.co.uk has sorted this out, and many a happy mile has been spent in the company of Kurt Vonnegut, Jerome K Jerome, Len Deighton ... I've loved them all, particularly Len, whose terribly British, Game, Set and Match series is the audio equivalent of marmite on toast.

Despite all this enjoyment, however, I do, finally, suspect that listening to a book isn't half as good as actually sitting down and reading one. Firstly, there's the fact that whereas when I sit down with a book it's just the book and me, an audiobook will rarely receive my undivided attention (indeed, they tend to work best as background). If I'm at my desk, I'm doing a bit of work. If I'm in the car, there's generally a bit of scenery to gaze at or map reading to tackle. If I'm in the kitchen, I'm washing the dishes or fiddling with dinner ... it's almost always a two-pronged affair, the audiobook competing with - or adding the soundtrack to - another activity.

Secondly, there's the question of pace. When I'm curled up with a book I can read a particularly lovely (or fiddly) passage over again. If my mind's been wondering, I might go back over a chapter or a page. I progress at my own speed, with plenty of time to analyse, reread, relish. With an audiobook, on the other hand, the pace is set by the reader. The narrative roars along at a gallop - and unless you're a fan of the rewind button there's limited room to admire telling details or pretty phrases. Story is all in audio - which probably explains why I've stuck to rip-roaring, plot-heavy fictions (Wilkie Collins, Daphne Du Maurier), and turned pale when a friend recently offered to lend me his tape-recording of James Joyce.

Of course, there's always the possibility that I'm wrong in all this. I might well just be a lazy listener - or an untrained one. (I can just imagine an inverse reality, in fact, with the audience of Homer saying: "Blimey, can you imagine having to read that? You'd miss all the inflections ...")

Interesting, anyway, to hear any thoughts on this. In the meantime, we're off to California in a week, and I think a bit of Chandler will be perfect ...