"Spoken language’s elaborate rhythms and inflections convey more meaning per word than the printed word. Compare a radio broadcast of a Shakespeare play to reading it. Word for word, listening will be easier. But readers can flip back and look at something whose meaning they might initially have missed; academics call this “regression.” Another advantage to reading is that you can “go off-line and think about what you read,” says James M. Royer, another psychology professor at U. Mass. Amherst. The weighing of relative merits gets pretty elaborate, no doubt partly because of academia’s multicultural sensitivity to non western cultures that exalt the oral tradition. Setting political correctness aside, however, it’s probably true that if you really want to absorb the multiple meanings, and you’re only going to do this once, reading is better. Books on tape also pose a time problem. Carver found that college-level readers optimally take in and understand spoken words at the same word rate that they take in written words—typically about 300 words per minute. The catch is that not even auctioneers can speak at a rate much beyond 250 words per minute. (To produce a 300-words-per-minute sample, Carter had to use a “time-compressed speech” device that compacts words and deletes fractions of dead air between words.) The 250-word count of an auctioneer is much faster than the 175 words per minute the typical book-on-tape actor manages."