People read for leisure. That monk was too busy refraining from pleasure to realize it.
Private reading and all new-fangled content to be read grew out of the middle class developed during Industrial Revolution: there was some money left to be used for books, paintings and music. Before that, people either read short bursts of text from religious books like the Bible in a communal ritual, or didn't read at all. There was mostly nothing else to read anyway and in any case people weren't alphabetized either. Oral narration ruled as favored past-time during beer time.
I'm sick of "social networking", leave me alone with my ebooks, will ya?
