It also fits in a handful of bytes or kilobytes what would take half a gigabyte to communicate in a video - sometimes making the difference if you have limited bandwidth or a cap on monthly traffic.

It's also ridiculously easy to cache (download a book in 9 seconds, board a transoceanic flight - no problem)

It also doesn't require the right sound and lighting conditions to see and understand a video (either those conditions, or good noise cancelling headphones - and now you're unaware of your surroundings)

It's also the only viable option on insanely low power devices which get months of battery life per charge.

It's also something you can read at an incredibly speedy pace if you are good at it and practice - though occasionally a decent audio/video player will be of use with this.

It's also something you can fall asleep while consuming, and tomorrow you won't have much trouble finding exactly where you left off.

I could continue..

Amen. It's one real "downside" in this day and age is that it requires fairly undivided attention to be used... that aside, it's without question my favorite way to interact with information.

On that note, a big thank you to whoever added "read this page" to Safari on iOS! Being able to turn long form articles into ad-hoc podcasts has been a game changer for me.

> Text is searchable, skippable, scrollable, compact, transmissible, and accessible in a way that audio and video have never managed to be.

That's just a very long way of saying it's difficult to monetise; it's why audio and video are preferred by producers of content.

Few people are interested in disseminating an idea, a concept, anything... they are interested in levelling up their fame and followers. Text is typically no good for that.

Text has a bunch of second-order properties that only become obvious once you try to replace it

It also the most portable - no codecs, no formats and standards; most English texts are just ASCII :)

Same thing if you swap "text" and "video". That's the point of different media - they differ along those dimensions. For example, "a picture is worth a thousand words" means that for some information it will be less compact to describe all the details of a video with words

It’s also runnable (scripts), clickable (urls), and context-dependent, which makes it a nice UI.

Video to a lot of people is way more engaging than text. Also video is much more information dense. You can’t teach people to do things over purely text but show them a video and a 1000 different indescribables become instantly apparent.

That being said I love a good book over its movie version anyway. Because text is cheap there is so much more detail you can include. There is no way text can compete with the information density of a video.