While I am largely a visual learner, I have found that audio reading has its benefits. Sometimes, reading assignments are so long that if I were to sit and read the entire thing, I would have time to do nothing else. But, if I listen to the book, I can do other things, like clean, crochet, cook, etc.
Librivox is a website catalog of audio recordings of books that are in the public domain - which means it's free. They have most of the books I have needed for my 18th and 19th century classes. I have found that it works well if I listen to every other chapter, reading the ones in between. The only downside is, of course, that you can read faster than someone else can read to you - but it does mean that you can multi-task. And some of the readers have rather nice reading voices and they make attempts at reading with feeling and voice.
