“Martin, Martin, Martin,” she said, “the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg’s day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments."
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
I was trying to explain to my 7 yo how powerful it is to be able to read, because you can now learn anything from books instead of waiting for teachers to teach you. When I described a shelf of books as an army of robot teachers, he started to get it.