In the age of artificial intelligence, the gravest threat to human civilisation is not the destruction of books, but the quiet disappearance of their readers.
There was a time when tyrants feared books. They burnt libraries, banned manuscripts, imprisoned writers and executed philosophers. They did so because they believed a society that reads is difficult to control, and impossible to enslave. Today, no dictator needs to burn a single book. We are doing it ourselves. The greatest tragedy of the 21st century is not that books are disappearing. It is that readers are.
