Books used to be places.

You opened one and disappeared for a while. You met people who never existed, loved people who never knew you, entered cities you’d never been to, and sometimes found a sentence that understood you better than anyone around you could.

Reading was never only about knowledge. It was about attention, about staying long enough for a thought to become uncomfortable, beautiful, or true.

Then suddenly, everything became faster.

Somewhere along the way, reading became another thing we were supposed to consume. We count the books we read, photograph them, recommend them, review them, and sometimes finish them just so we can say we did. Somewhere between the endless scrolling and the constant noise, reading became difficult. Not because books became less interesting, but because we became less accustomed to sitting still.

Perhaps thats why books once held such a high value. They demanded something from us that we don’t have anymore: patience. And perhaps that is what we have really lost. Not books, nor their value. But our ability to sit quietly with something that does not immediately entertain us.

You can sometimes see the difference simply by looking at older generations. There is something almost strange about watching an older person sit quietly with a book for an hour, without checking their phone every few minutes or feeling the need to document what they are reading. For them, reading was often part of the rhythm of the day. A book could sit beside a cup of coffee, on a balcony, by a window, or next to a bed, waiting to be opened. There was no pressure to finish it quickly or prove that you had read it. You simply read.

And perhaps this is what makes the contrast with the present so noticeable. We carry entire libraries in our phones, yet somehow find ourselves with less time to read. We have access to more books than anyone before us could have imagined, yet our attention is constantly being pulled somewhere else. The problem was never that books became harder to find. They became harder to choose over everything else.

A book does not shout for our attention. It waits on a shelf, quietly gathering dust, while the world screams through our screens.

And maybe that is why reading still matters. Because in a world that is always trying to make us look at something else, opening a book is still an act of choosing where to look.

Maybe books never lost their value. Maybe we just became too distracted to notice it.