On July 2nd, a Russian strike destroyed an estimated 800,000 books. One of many missiles that night hit the central warehouse of the Book Chef publishing house. Behind every one of those books stood a great deal of human labor — and behind the financial headlines sits a harder question that the story hasn't asked: why books, and what do they mean now?
Behind each destroyed book stands a long chain of people: authors across every genre whose intellectual work will now never reach a reader, along with translators and editors, illustrators and designers, and the vast unseen labor of printers, managers, and logistics teams. Every single book represents an enormous amount of work. In the media, this strike has mostly been framed as a large-scale financial loss — one of many forms of destruction Ukraine has suffered over the past several years. Current coverage focuses almost entirely on counting what was lost. Left unasked, outside the ashes of the print run, is a more basic question: why books? What do they mean today?
Reading rewired the brain — and can be lost the same way
Reading is a cultural invention. Unlike the perception of sound or visual images, the ability to read was never a native capacity of the human brain — it is a remarkable cultural achievement, one that required the brain to do genuinely enormous work to master, restructuring its basic architecture and rewiring its neurons in the process. It is this same capacity for restructuring — neuroplasticity — that lets us learn things entirely new and unplanned for. Neuroplasticity is directly tied to intelligence: it helped us learn to read in the first place, and reading itself, in turn, trains it further. The cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, who studies the reading brain, writes about exactly this in her book Reader, Come Home.
The act of reading rests on three particular features of the brain. First, neuroplasticity: it lets us adapt to any format — from paper to screens — and keep learning continuously. Second, the brain's capacity to build new neural networks that instantly recognize letters and assemble them into meaningful words. Third, a startling speed of processing: within milliseconds, the brain coordinates multiple regions at once so that we can understand a text. Reading, in other words, is a case of us "reprogramming" our own nature in the name of growth.
Wolf also raises a serious concern: that digital technologies are gradually eroding our capacity for critical analysis and empathy — what she calls deep reading. She describes deep reading as the capacity to form mental images: guided by a text and an author's cues, we picture characters, take in a narrative from inside a character's perspective, and see the world through their eyes. An author builds these images out of carefully chosen sensory detail, and a reader, absorbing them, becomes capable of an emotional response even to a minimal handful of words.
"Without the habit of analyzing a text and cross-checking facts, it becomes far harder to tell truth from invention."
The quality of our reading depends on practice: the more we read, the better we get at telling truth from fabrication. A lack of practice weakens logic and deduction, leaving us defenseless against manipulation. Because a narrow frame of reference makes complex ideas harder to grasp, it matters that we keep expanding what we know. Deep reading is the counterweight to fragmented, "clip" thinking — in deep reading, the brain works like a detective, recruiting the prefrontal cortex to analyze what it takes in.
The more often we read complex texts, the stronger the links become between our analytical capacities, our empathy, and our store of background knowledge. When books become less accessible, or we simply read less, the brain gradually loses its ability to critically evaluate information. In unstable times, this turns into a serious problem: without the habit of analyzing a text and cross-checking facts, it becomes far harder to tell truth from invention. As a result, people become easier targets for manipulation and propaganda — without a critical eye, it becomes far simpler to accept whatever narrative is handed to you.
What reading does for emotional intelligence
Reading also has a direct effect on emotional intelligence (EI). The ability to understand the causes of emotion, command of language, and self-control are all critical skills for effective interaction and collaboration. Since persistence and experience alone aren't enough, developing EI becomes a precondition for success, for better psychological wellbeing, and for stable relationships.
Research confirms that emotion and cognition are inseparably linked: the brain regions responsible for EI overlap with those responsible for general intelligence. Broadly, EI is the capacity to effectively integrate emotion into cognitive processing.
Reading is a universal tool for developing emotional intelligence too, and it works through two main channels — direct and indirect. Anyone can recognize the indirect one in themselves: following the inner life of characters as they move through difficult events, examine their own actions, and gradually arrive at new understanding — and, alongside them, learning something yourself from their story. How deep that self-reflection runs depends on the age category and complexity of the work. Detective fiction is a good example: following Sherlock Holmes forces the reader to untangle the same complex knots of events as the protagonist, sharpening skills of analysis and prediction along the way.
Reading can also affect our emotional intelligence directly. This applies to popular science and psychological literature, where emotions — their mechanisms, their nature in our lives, and questions like the limits of acceptable behavior in relationships — are placed front and center. Unlike fiction, where emotion unfolds through plot, these books hand the reader concrete knowledge about the structure of the psyche, help them recognize similar emotional mechanisms in themselves, teach conscious management of their own reactions, and pull the reader into the world of psychology. This too enriches emotional intelligence. In the end, we become steadier, more confident in communication, and better able to adapt to life's circumstances. Reading expands our own emotional palette, which makes us more flexible. Every page read becomes useful experience, if we're willing to look at it that way.
The physical book, in unstable times
It's tempting to think that in the digital age, the destruction of a print run is merely a technical inconvenience — that text genuinely outlives paper, since the files remain, and that this strike is really just a technical pause for the publisher rather than a total loss.
But in conditions of instability, the physical book stays relevant regardless. It is an archive of different lines of thought, a dialogue between author and reader that needs no external infrastructure to keep functioning. Destroying texts interrupts that flow for a great many people.
The disappearance of a large number of printed editions means just as many empty spaces on bookstore shelves. The fewer physical books on the market, the rarer the chance for a reader to stumble by accident on a work that could prove decisive for them. Many people find the book that fits their exact problem precisely because it caught their eye — a cover, a well-chosen epigraph. That kind of spontaneous encounter with an idea is an important mechanism by which thought spreads, and by which the works that shape entire worldviews find their readers over time. As printed books become scarcer, the space for those discoveries narrows. Preserving books is a genuine investment in a person's all-round development.
Not everyone, either, is ready to move to digital editions. For many, paper itself is critically important — its tactility, and the particular mood that comes with the act of buying it. For a segment of readers, the paper format remains the only comfortable way to take in information. In the accelerated pace of modern life, reading away from digital devices lets you pause, sink deeper into a text, and be alone with your thoughts without the usual scattering of attention. As the number of physical books shrinks, that experience is gradually being lost.
Digital media change the very quality of our attention: it becomes shallower than it is during the reading of paper books. As sources of information multiply, we increasingly lose the capacity for deep, empathetic engagement with a text — because depending on the format, the brain recruits entirely different cognitive mechanisms to process it.
The foundation of our thinking is background knowledge — the store of social and historical-cultural experience we accumulate over a lifetime. Without that context, it's impossible to fully grasp the meaning of a story or feel the emotion an author has built into it. Every book read expands that store, strengthening our capacity for analysis and interpretation. That base of knowledge is a necessary tool for critically processing new information. But today, reliable sources are increasingly being crowded out by dubious content. When we lose the habit of turning to verified texts, we become vulnerable to manipulation and to false claims that are easy to mistake for truth — a situation that is only growing more widespread, as our collective capacity to critically assess reality and think independently keeps declining.
Censorship doesn't need a warehouse fire
A physical book is visible proof that a piece of cultural heritage has been preserved. In the digital era, that concept is under threat. In recent years we've watched a string of controversies around censorship, as publishers began quietly editing the ebook editions of beloved twentieth-century authors — among them Roald Dahl, R. L. Stine, and Agatha Christie.
Puffin Books, for instance, edited Dahl's texts to remove descriptions of characters' weight and gender. A similar fate met R. L. Stine's Goosebumps and Christie's detective novels, where character descriptions were altered, references to boys' bad behavior were softened, and ethnic caricatures were removed. None of these changes were agreed with the authors — the edits were news even to Stine himself. Public backlash eventually forced the publishers to keep the original versions on sale alongside the revised ones. But in every case, the ebooks already sold had been altered irreversibly, with no way back. The episode exposed a real problem: a digital edition can always be changed after the fact, permanently, and the reader — sometimes even the author — often has no idea the content on their device has been altered. When you buy an ebook, you don't actually own it; you're using a copy the publisher can change at any moment.
This goes beyond a question of copyright — it touches the very foundation of how we think. The capacity to read is a uniquely human ability, one that once restructured our brains and became the engine of culture and intellectual growth. But today, under the influence of screens and digital stimulation, the quality of our attention is changing.
We notice that reading gives us that feeling of immersion less and less often than it used to. The attention of today's children and young people is constantly pulled toward outside stimuli that leave nothing behind once they pass. The habit of drawing analogies and reaching independent conclusions — a habit deep reading used to build — is gradually fading; people start turning to books only when they specifically need to. The shift from a culture built on thoughtful reading to one of digital content consumption carries real consequences for how we think. It matters, right now, to watch these changes closely and think them through — so that we consciously preserve the capacity for critical thought across a wide circle of people, and avoid a dramatic rupture in how successive generations develop. This question is directly tied to how a community preserves its culture.
What survives a fire
Culture is a continuous current, and no destruction of physical material can interrupt that process. We should remember that everything that happens in this sphere carries its own weight. A book is part of the cultural space of daily life — something we can see, something we can touch, something we pass from hand to hand.
The physical book is a fixed foundation that guarantees the capacity for intellectual freedom. This habit builds our capacity for empathy, critical thinking, and understanding of context. Deep reading remains a reliable way to preserve intellectual independence, even now, in an age short on attention. Unlike digital copies, which can be edited or deleted at any moment, a printed edition guarantees protection from unilateral censorship and offers the direct, tactile experience that so many people need for genuine immersion in a text. Preserving home libraries, and sustaining the market for paper books, is a real investment in our own development.