well, i have an irrational fondness for the media format, because it's a media format that has given me a lot of pleasure. also, though, while i don't read as many books as i used to either, i still think they're actually the best format for some things

i am puzzled by this statement that 'most great ideas can be transmitted in less than 200 pages of text'. do you mean that the total of the world's great ideas add up to less than 200 pages? or do you mean that each individual idea takes less than 200 pages? enormously less, i'd think; i would argue that each great idea in knuth's taocp is about half a page, but there are several thousand of them, one right after the other, boom boom boom

i do not think you can put all the ideas in taocp into action after reading a few summaries, or indeed after reading the series from beginning to end without stopping. you have to do the exercises and think about things a lot. books are really good at pausing and rewinding, and they support annotation well

if you spend 100 hours reading blogs and 100 hours doing exercises from taocp (and reading the text preceding the exercises) you will find that your skills improve enormously more in the second 100 hours. this is because reading things doesn't improve your skills

then the question is, why do exercises from a book instead of from a blog or something? and the answer is that the required blogs don't seem to exist. the closest thing is something like khan academy, but they only cover super basic stuff. naturally, ebooks are perfectly fine for this, and a lot more portable, but paper books have larger screens than portable computers that weigh more

pictures are of course wonderful, and taocp in particular would be better with more of them. and for things like how to grout tile, how to dance contact improv, how a dobby loom works, or how people are being burned alive, books are grossly inadequate, and other media like video are much better

books are also nice for reference purposes but wikipedia is usually better for stuff that's slightly mainstream

there's a factor of how much effort is involved. a 256-page book might take you three hours to read, but only a person-year to write. a community of practice of, i don't know, 2000 user-interface researchers can write books (or blogs) about their area of user interface research or whatever faster than you can possibly read all of them. the only lazier medium is livestreaming, where three hours of some dipshit yelling at the camera produces three hours of content. a three-hour movie, by contrast, takes hundreds of person-years, so such movies only exist when someone can be persuaded to risk a fortune on their commercial prospects. 2000 makeup artists, puppeteers, actors, digital cgi artists, etc., can make maybe six such movies a year, most of which you'd still regret watching

it sort of sounds like you're not looking for what i would call 'ideas', which is to say, mental tools that make you more powerful. you are looking for a slick salesman type to 'pitch' you 'actionables', which is to say, to manipulate you into doing what they want with some kind of emotional rhetoric and a call to action. canonical examples include televangelists, carnival barkers, ted talks, and literally hitler. to me your desire seems pathological, like cutting yourself to get relief from mental anguish, because the actionables he will pitch you are for his benefit, not yours. you're seeking to be abused and exploited. i hope you get better and learn to slam the door in the faces of people who pitch you actionables instead of seeking them out