Walk into the BMICH this week and you will hear something no algorithm has managed to reproduce: the sound of a crowd turning pages. Schoolchildren clutch bags heavy with purchases, parents follow closely behind them, and elderly readers stand in the aisles, lost in a paragraph. The 27th Colombo International Book Fair, which runs until 4 October, opened to large crowds, including students, both young and old among them. In an age when a machine can summarise a novel in seconds, that is worth pausing over.

We live in remarkable times. Artificial intelligence can draft letters, translate languages and answer questions that once sent us to a library. It would be foolish to dismiss these tools, and many Sri Lankan students and professionals already use them daily, often to good effect.

But information is not the same as understanding, and speed is not the same as depth. A summary hands you a conclusion. A book makes you walk the road that led there. When we read a serious work of history, a well-made novel or a patient collection of poems, we are building the habit of sustained attention, and with it the ability to hold a complicated idea in our heads for longer than a scroll.

That habit is under strain. Teachers speak of pupils who struggle to stay with a single text for more than a few minutes, and adults are no better. We check our screens dozens of times a day and call it keeping up. Reading a book is a small act of resistance against that fragmentation. It asks for an hour, sometimes a week, and gives back something a feed cannot: a mind slightly rearranged by another person's thinking.

There is also the matter of empathy. Fiction lets a reader live inside a life very unlike their own. A young person in Galle can spend an evening in the mind of a tea plucker in Nuwara Eliya, a fisherman in Jaffna or a stranger in another century. No tidy paragraph from a chatbot can replace that slow, imaginative work. In a country that has known division, the value of learning to see through another's eyes hardly needs explaining.

Language matters too. The book fair is unusual in that Sinhala, Tamil and English titles sit within a few steps of one another. For many families this is where a child first meets the written word in their mother tongue beyond the textbook. Much of the technology we admire is built first for the largest languages of the world. Our own literatures survive only if they are read, printed and passed on. Every Sinhala novel or Tamil poetry collection bought this week is a small vote for their future.

Local publishers deserve support too. Paper and printing costs are rising and the market is small, so a week of launches and discounts matters. Buying from a local imprint keeps writers writing.

None of this is an argument against technology. The wisest approach is to use it as a servant rather than a substitute. Let the machine check a date, translate a phrase or suggest a title. Then close the laptop and open the book. A reader who has spent years with real books is better equipped to question what an AI tells them, to sense when a fluent answer is hollow, and to recognise what a good argument feels like. Reading is not the rival of the digital age. It is the training that lets us live in it with our judgement intact.

So we urge readers, and parents in particular, to make the trip before the fair closes. Take the children. Let them wander, choose something for themselves and carry it home. Put a book in a teenager's hand before the next device.

The pages will not refresh themselves or send notifications. They wait, patiently, for us to arrive. It is good to see so many doing exactly that.