Going to have to argue the other direction...<p>First on the Input/ knowledge gain:
100 - 150 wpm is roughly what people speak at, versus average reading speed of 200 to 250 wpm all the way up to 1000 wpm for top speed readers. If we were to analyze straight by wpm you can put into you Reading is 2X-10X better... Not that it's even a good argument though.<p>Books take a long time to create because the information is curated. The author of the article makes a decent point that people should focus on great books... and the answer there is yea... they should focus on great books over listening to podcasts. And yes ... there are a lot of good books out there.
I can read infinitely faster than I can listen, which to me suggests that even if the signal to noise is lower the value for time is higher for reading. Podcasts are also rarely as well edited as books are. It is strange too, to attribute value to the medium rather than the content.
Books take some time to generate in a professional manner.<p>the manuscript is one thing then finding a publisher, and getting through the legaleese.<p>as a result, a published book may be 5 or more years out of date by the time it is published.<p>This is why some of my "proffs" refused to endorse a particular text, but would publish reserves to the library, and recommend select portions of a text for background information to prime to collegiate for the lectures.<p>so you can read about how "it" was thought to be, and assimilate what is the most up to date take on "it" from the horses mouth, the person that is actually doing the science that is written about in the texts.<p>.....and of course i am typing about the uni lecture, and not recreational reading.
Hilariously weak logic... reading has higher information rate than listening. Written content can be parsed rapidly to focus on interesting chapters and sections of books. Main use case for listening to podcasts (incl vs. scanning podcast written transcripts) is in the case of listening while doing another activity (e.g. driving a car).
I listen to a lot of the New Books Network podcasts. Usually the interview is better than the book, but the interview wouldn’t exist if the author hadn’t put the work into writing the book. But yeah, life is too short to see how everybody worked out every idea.