Books feed you minimum data ... a string of characters ... completely devoid of any of the senses that you actually imagine you are experiencing: an active colorful audible 3D world.
Your own brain does almost all the work of manufacturing the reality, the author only provides the barest of guides. And your mind also adds layers of meaning onto whatever meaning the author makes explicit.
So I would say the act of reading a book is far from a passive or trivial activity.
In fact, I am hard pressed to imagine another activity so dependent on our own brain's ability for continuous creative production. D&D, scientific research, etc. all happen at a much slower pace.
I think the slower pace indicates more effort and greater levels of integration of different concepts. The kind of creativity involved in reading is like paint-by-numbers, while writing is like actual painting. It takes much more than an order of magnitude more time to write fiction than to read it for me, because it's so much less structured.
I agree with that. Creative production and problem solving, accompanied by a strong internal standards pushing us further for higher quality or impact than we achieved before, is the pinnacle.
But reading is far more active form of receiving, than other forms of learning or entertainment.
Your own brain does almost all the work of manufacturing the reality, the author only provides the barest of guides. And your mind also adds layers of meaning onto whatever meaning the author makes explicit.
So I would say the act of reading a book is far from a passive or trivial activity.
In fact, I am hard pressed to imagine another activity so dependent on our own brain's ability for continuous creative production. D&D, scientific research, etc. all happen at a much slower pace.