I'm in the same boat as both of you regarding taking little away from video, but while I see this statement a lot, my limited experience doesn't seem to match (of course, neither of these things indicates either position is correct in any meaningful way). Is there a reason you believe this, or is it just other people you've met/spoken with who have that preference?
A two-way conversation or even a live person talking work well enough. But if I want to understand something in great detail and be sure that I get it, I'm going to need text.
The only thing I haven't done yet is print books. Maybe eventually.
If you're interested in print, it's actually very easy. I used Aaron Shepard's books to get a rough idea of how things worked, and also found a freelancer who showed me the ropes. His 'Plan B' is great advice for how to get amazon to discount your book without reducing your royalties.
If you have any questions about POD, I'd be happy to help. My email's in my profile.
Be careful you aren't looking at presentations in video format as an example of video for learning. It's not.
What I've found--it's entirely puzzling to me--the new generation does indeed.
I teach kids computer stuff and one of them (14) is experimenting with writing minecraft mods in Java. He seriously prefers watching a YouTube screencast of somebody narrating what he's doing in the Eclipse IDE over reading the exact same info on the minecraft modding wiki. There's no editing, direction, it's just a screencast of an IDE. It's tedious because when he gets stuck I have to seek through the video where he went wrong, a lot more effort than a quick scroll through a long wiki page. He knows this, and tries to work off text tutorials a bit more, but to me the case is more than clear: the current generation of young hackers prefers screencasts (and I really cannot fathom why, but I take it as a lesson in becoming an old fart).
When you test them do they achieve the same outcome you would expect from a text?
That said, yes he's definitely not just blindly following the steps in the screencasts but really trying to make his own thing and figure shit out. He also does other stuff (had a go at Unity--unfortunately I didn't have enough time to learn it myself first). A lot of the kids here actually have a bit of a resistance against just blindly following set instructions without adding their own ideas to it :) Often I have to hold them back a bit--just do this simple exercise first, yes just exactly like that, it'll give you some insights on the basics and after that you can have a go at trying to work out your grand idea (I word it differently of course, but that's the gist).
And yeah he may not understand all of what's going on when going through the decompile - run script - modify - repackage steps in minecraft, but he does learn a lot. There's no real set goals, if he learns that "whatever a computer is supposed to do, I can alter it and make it do my own wishes" at the very least, just learning about the possibilities (aka more than a microwave oven), it'll plant the seeds of a hacker-spirit :) (though in this particular example I can assure you it goes further than that)
And we'll see where it goes from there. If I notice they just learned one trick and go through the same motions every time I'll try to put them on a more challenging track. Although even in that case, say a kid is making a game (we use GameMaker) and after having struggled through a basic gameplay engine they are comfortable with simply creation zillions of levels, I don't necessarily stop them, as long as they're being creative. It doesn't have to be programming after all, if that is not their talent, maybe they can think up a great storyline, or draw cool graphics. Also it turns out that most modern games do in fact have zillions of levels, and when I see them ordering them into "world 1", "world 2", they must be up to something. That example is about a bunch of 8 year old btw, so I don't expect hardcore hacking/programming yet (but they're clever!), one of these 8 year olds was so super-proud of the game he had been working at for a while, "This game is getting really really AWESOME"--that can't be wrong :)
I often record the audio off a video (if I can't directly download it) and listen to it at 300% speed when I'm doing other activities that don't require mental focus.
Like you, I can't stand it - I jump straight to a transcript or other text to consume the information: I read and understand WAY faster than people talk (or I can listen).
That said, I hate physical books, and am much happier with a PDF (or better, an actual ebook format) for the full price of a regular, physical book. I'm paying for the content, not the dead tree components.