Last month, the Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s education minister Ziya Selcuk revealed — proudly — that 301,878 books had been taken out of schools and libraries and destroyed. All these books were purportedly connected to Fethullah Gulen, the cleric blamed for the failed coup attempt against Erdogan’s government in 2016. Since the coup, a report by English PEN found that several periodicals and 30 publishing houses had been shut down and that 80 authors have been prosecuted or criminally investigated.

The list around the globe goes on. In Egypt, the regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has imprisoned independent writers, raided bookstores and forced libraries to close . At the extreme end of the scale, ISIS notoriously burned over 100,000 rare books and manuscripts housed in the Mosul Public Library, some dating back a millennium.

Regimes are expending so much energy attacking books because their supposed limitations have begun to look like strengths: With online surveillance, digital reading carries with it great risks and semi-permanent footprints; a physical book, however, cannot monitor what you are reading and when, cannot track which words you mark or highlight, does not secretly scan your face, and cannot know when you are sharing it with others.

There is an intimacy to reading, a place created in which we can imagine the experiences of others and experiment with new ideas, all within the safety and privacy of our imaginations. Research has proved that reading a printed book, rather than on a screen, generates more engagement, especially among young people. Books make us empathetic, skeptical, even seditious. It’s only logical then that totalitarian regimes have made their destruction such a visible priority. George Orwell knew this well: the great crime that tempts Winston in “1984” is the reading of a banned book.

The United States used to stand up against this erasure of intellectual freedom. When America entered the Second World War, verbal attacks on Nazi book burning were a central plank in the Office of War Information’s propaganda strategy. “No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny,” President Franklin Roosevelt declared.