Even the most settled digital native must half-suspect that a quick skim online is less likely to bring real enlightenment than reading a proper study by a genuine expert. You might also be tempted to imagine a world in which there'd been 700 years of the internet, before, in the Nineties, somebody invented books. It would surely seem a miracle that, instead of trawling through acres of semi-reliable information, you could have a guaranteed, portable and inexpensive source of knowledge from someone who knows both how to write and what they're talking about.
But it appears that in his shock discovery of books' potential, Zuckerberg is not alone. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal praised a new campaign for "slow reading", whose members meet once a week in a cafe, turn off their phones for a whole hour and read in silence. Such quiet reading, the headline declared, can "benefit your brain" (again, not a revelation that would have startled Sherlock Holmes).
While today's bibliophiles might want to pounce on anything that smacks of good news, I can't help wondering if using books purely as a means of self-improvement - with elements of self-congratulation thrown in - misses the point of reading.
Last year, Nick Hornby managed to stir up controversy by suggesting that people should read books for enjoyment, and so not bother finishing the ones they don't enjoy.
"Every time we pick up a book from a sense of duty," he explained, "we're reinforcing the notion that reading is something you should do, but telly [or, presumably, surfing the internet] is something you want to do."
The insistence on a book a fortnight may not be terribly punishing, but it does seem to come from the same slightly teeth-gritted impulse as a booze-free January or a new fitness target.
More importantly, though, Zuckerberg's choice of The End of Power suggests that he's fallen for a notion now so prevalent that it's easy to forget how philistine it is: the idea that the books you read should be relevant to your life. Admittedly, if you're running a huge online corporation, it might be gratifying to read about the internet's effect on politics, particularly if that effect suits you rather well. Admittedly, too, the idea that relevance matters is by no means restricted to billionaire plutocrats, but can also be heard in plenty of review programmes. None the less, one of the central reasons for reading is surely to experience lives other than your own - either in non-fiction or, perhaps especially, in novels.
A novel relevant to my life, for example, would feature a freelance writer living in south London who has two children and is occasionally required to produce, say, a piece for The Daily Telegraph. But I can get that at home. Only through fiction do we get the welcome and even vital sense of what it's like to be somebody else -which is why, in his surprisingly full-throated defence of the James Bond books, Kingsley Amis patiently pointed out to Ian Fleming's snootier detractors that "all literature is escapist". Or, as John Updike put it somewhat more high-mindedly: "What is important, if not the human individual? And where can individuality be better confronted, appraised and enjoyed than in fiction's shapely lies?"
So, in the unlikely event that Mark Zuckerberg would like some tips from me, let me suggest that he moves on to novels next - and ideally ones that bear no relationship to his life or those of other Facebook users. Anything from Dostoyevsky to Raymond Chandler should do the trick. Then again, if he wants to be confronted with some real opposition, he could try Dave Eggers's The Circle, which takes a convincingly ferocious view of how a global online company operates. Or, if he wants to stick to non-fiction, he could recommend the forthcoming and crunchingly polemical book by CNN reporter Andrew Keen. Its title? The internet Is Not the Answer.
