Learning About Learning:
Books Can Do What Nothing Else Can
The United States is wrestling with a new wave of book censorship lately. Educators and librarians are being fired for refusing to remove books from shelves; parents are insisting that even innocuous children’s books like Dawn McMillan’s "I Need A New Butt!" are removed from shelves.
That’s why writer Ryan Holiday, who owns a bookstore in the centre of Texas, opened up a Common Sense Banned Book Library in the storefront next door.
“Every book in the library has been banned or challenged somewhere,” he writes. “I hope that it can serve as one small counterblow against this deranged book-banning impulse spreading across the country. These are books that common sense tells us are harmless fun and important to be kept available.
”In an era where nobody owns anything anymore — and the digital things we think we own can disappear with the push of a button — there’s something special about actual, physical books.
The amount of writing is increasing, but there’s not a corollary increase in reading. And writing without reading has value… but only for the writer
What books provide:
When Jeff Bezos first introduced the Kindle to the world in 2007, he used a copy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable in the presentation. Taleb was horrified. “I like books,” he writes, “and by books I mean that inconvenient thing you hold in your hand, pick up from a table, and carry in your backpack.”
The rise of e-readers and online reading has been a trade-off: Yes, you have access to more, but something is lost when books move from distinct pieces to one giant feed.
“You think you are reading abstract content, but we are not abstract beings,” Taleb writes, “and the physical book recruits more channels than you can intellectually perceive.”
The act of pulling an annotated book from his personal library instantly transports Taleb back to the ideas he had while reading it. “Once you’ve read a book,” he writes, “you are effectively rereading it every time you take a glance at it” — something that is lost when every book on Earth is on your device.
For John Paul Hernandez, losing the physicality of books is also a loss of human connection. Hernandez sees reading books in public as an invitation. He recently ran into a neighbour he didn’t know well carrying a copy of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary:
“That’s a great book,” I said.
He hesitated as he watched his wife and children continue walking toward the exit of the amenity centre. He turned to me, eager to start a conversation. “You read it?” he asked.
I told him I did and that it was a favourite read of mine.
“My boss told me it was good, so I just figured I would read it too,” he shrugged, implying he wouldn’t normally read it. Then he began asking about science fiction in general, and how he’d been dabbling in that world…. It wasn’t long after that I found other things in common with him and ran into him again, continuing the conversation over time.
If the neighbour had been reading it on an e-reader, it would be extremely unlikely that Hernandez would have been able to clock the novel. Taleb speaks of this too: “A single book with different contents induces a loss in differentiation.”
With physical books, you can read Project Hail Mary or The Black Swan, make a connection, and impart importance on that object; if you’re on an e-reader, it’s more likely than not to blend together.
We used to feel shame about our ignorance. Now we revel in it. Stupidity is the ultimate flex as long as you’re going viral.
— Felicia C. Sullivan, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Book?
The war on reading
Reading for pleasure is a measurable good, write William Dee Nicholls and Michelle Kearney for The Conversation U.S. If you read fiction, you are more likely to score higher on cognitive tests, and have a larger vocabulary and enhanced focus. Most importantly, you are able to expand your understanding and develop empathy for those different from you.
But reading for pleasure among kids is on the decline, according to a recent study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress: “Just 37% of 9-year-olds and 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day in 2025.”
Why? The answers are mostly structural. Nicholls and Kearney suggest a focus on phonics and structured reading, with fewer opportunities for independent reading, has had an unintended effect of making reading books less of a skill and more of a task. When teachers can disassociate the reading books from schoolwork, it pays dividends:
In 2024, literacy researcher Chase Young recalled asking a second grader whether a classroom reading activity had made him a better reader. The child responded, “No, because it’s fun.”
Ray Bradbury describes this in the reading list standard Fahrenheit 451, one of Holiday’s favourite books. “This horrendous burning of books hadn’t been forced on them by a tyrant. They had chosen it.” Holiday writes. “One group didn’t like one book. Another group didn’t feel good about another. So burn it. Make everyone comfortable.”
Ensuring that kids have not only the time to read on their own, but the ability to read things that may challenge them, will build stronger, better, more empathetic people. As Holiday writes:
Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain. Read dangerously. Read what they’d rather you not see, not know, not think. Wrestle with it. Challenge and disagree with it.
And, above all, learn from it.