Yes, unless you suck at reading. In general, reading is the most efficient way to learn about a topic. (I say this as someone who does enjoy podcasts and video lectures. I also say this as someone who thinks that all the reading in the world likely won’t help you grok nutrition and training as it relates to fat loss and hypertrophy—mainly because everything out there to read on these topics is garbage.)
“Language at the Speed of Sight” (Mark Seidenberg):
"Reading is the prime example of a technological add-on that extended our capacities beyond their natural limits. Then there is the brute-force, zero-to-sixty increase in comprehension speed that reading affords. This isn’t because the speed of light is faster than the speed of sound. It is because of the difference in who controls the rate of transmission.
Reading lags behind from the start and continues to do so well after the onset of schooling. Becoming literate is the scenario by which reading reading catches up to speech and then surpasses it. With the acquisition of sufficient skill, reading takes over as the primary means by which linguistic knowledge continues to expand, because many words and sentence structures appear in print but rarely in speech, and as the primary means to acquire the specialized knowledge of a topic or type of text on which comprehension depends.
The audiobook (“Sorcerer’s Stone”) runs about twice as long as our EPA estimate of reading time. Although the numbers are only approximate, the 2:1 ratio between listening and reading times is realistic. Average speaking rates in English are in the 120 to 180 words per minute (wpm) range, and guidelines for recording audiobooks recommend 120 to 150 wpm, which is about half the typical skilled reading rate (4 to 5 words per second = 240 to 300 wpm). Most audiobook and podcast players allow the speed to be cranked up, but playback at 300 words per minute is hard to comprehend except for short stretches.
Technology has unquestionably changed how we acquire and exchange information; text is no longer the only option, and it’s great. Compare the experience of reading the front page of the New York Times from a century ago with using the nytimes.com website. The website integrates other media with text, but the format also makes the text itself easier and more inviting to read. It’s win-win. Yes, being able to effectively use these technologies is important, but a person still has to be able to read. Written language has unique expressive capacities.
The availability of so much information in so many forms is a spectacular resource for those who have access to it, but writing retains advantages over pictographs, even animated ones. My concern about the emphasis on multiple literacies is that it devalues the importance of reading and teaching reading at a time when they need more attention, not less. Educators, the early adopters, seem to be overanticipating a future in which written language is a legacy technology, replaced by other means of communication. It’s a familiar argument.
Since advantages continue to accrue to those who can read in the traditional sense, it seems essential—a moral imperative, even—to hold educators to developing children’s reading and writing skills.”
And from wikipedia on the Matthew Effect with regards to reading:
"In education, the term "Matthew effect" has been adopted by psychologist Keith Stanovich to describe a phenomenon observed in research on how new readers acquire the skills to read: early success in acquiring reading skills usually leads to later successes in reading as the learner grows, while failing to learn to read before the third or fourth year of schooling may be indicative of lifelong problems in learning new skills. [15]
This is because children who fall behind in reading would read less, increasing the gap between them and their peers. Later, when students need to "read to learn" (where before they were learning to read), their reading difficulty creates difficulty in most other subjects. In this way they fall further and further behind in school, dropping out at a much higher rate than their peers.
In the words of Stanovich:
Slow reading acquisition has cognitive, behavioral, and motivational consequences that slow the development of other cognitive skills and inhibit performance on many academic tasks. In short, as reading develops, other cognitive processes linked to it track the level of reading skill. Knowledge bases that are in reciprocal relationships with reading are also inhibited from further development. The longer this developmental sequence is allowed to continue, the more generalized the deficits will become, seeping into more and more areas of cognition and behavior. Or to put it more simply – and sadly – in the words of a tearful nine-year-old, already falling frustratingly behind his peers in reading progress, "Reading affects everything you do."[16]