Our ability to gain access to and read books has actually been absolutely important to our capability to comprehend the world around us.
It can be hard to envision what the world would resemble today if the vast bulk of individuals were not able to read, but for the huge bulk of history the vast bulk of people could not, and nor were books available even if they could. It was the innovation of the printing press towards the close of the 15th that changed that, making books far more accessible. Of course, it was still just really the wealthiest and well-educated that could read or write, but it allowed a whole host of developments in science, art, and thinking to be spread across great distances. Consider what would have occurred if the theory of gravity, or of evolution, could not have been dispersed across the globe. Human civilisation rests upon a structure of books, and we are fortunate to be able to simply log onto a site like the one backed by the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books, and easily gain access to the totality of human knowledge.
With such an abundant history of ideas, occasions, and stories right at our fingertips, it's in some cases simple to forget how extremely lucky we are to have the likes of the founder of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones or the CEO of the asset manager with a stake in Amazon books supporting access to a big percentage of all the books that have ever been composed (or the good ones at least). The best books of all time can quickly change the manner in which you look at the world, which has held true throughout all of history too. The contemporary world is built on knowledge that has actually been passed down through books, whether that is ideology, science, or history, and human civilisation would not be anywhere near as advanced as it is today if it had not been for the books that changed minds throughout the ages.
It's important to keep in mind that, although a lot of the best modern books of all time tend to be considered ground-breaking works of fiction, for the majority of humanity's literary history, we did not compose much fiction at all. Most stories would have been sung throughout the great bulk of history, merely since the huge majority of people might not read, meaning that a lot of books were specialised things meant for those few who could understand them. After a quick boom during the classical age of antiquity, the quantity of literate individuals dropped drastically throughout the Middle Ages. Books became unusual treasures, with monks fastidiously copying out the surviving traditional texts by hand so as to maintain them, as they were some of the only members of the population who were able to read or write. They were the specialist keepers of knowledge like biology and faith that we all have access to in the modern world.