You’ve snuck in another conditional: when you’re close to someone, correct, you shouldn’t offer imperatives like “read books.”
You’d ideally be recommending books that are tailored to their needs and interests (which, remember, is not the same as your prior examples, which were specific books pushed on people regardless of their needs and interests).
You’d be hard-pressed to find a single decent educator who disagrees with you, though it’s easy to come to the idea that you’re contrarian on this point.
There are two factors: 1) educators have to suggest a small set of books for a large group of students due to the scale of mass education. AFAICT almost every educator regards this as a problem but it’s not exactly helped by views like “reading books is a dumb goal.” 2) when educators are talking about overall goals and policy, they obviously cannot say “well for person X we want them to read book X; for person Y we want them to read book Y, etc.” This washes out as “we want students writ large to read books writ large.”
The overall objective is to build a baseline ability for every student to be able to find, navigate, and interpret information. A lot of our society’s information is stored in a particular format called “book” that is navigated differently from other formats. Despite the generic-sounding imperative to read books, it is self-evidently the case that the only way to achieve it is by meeting each individual student where they are in terms of both skill level and interests, so that’s what educators try to do. Again: this is extremely challenging in mass education environments!
Other information formats should be and are also part of a good educational system, obviously, including manuals and instructional videos. I have clear memory of manuals and cookbooks even in my early education, which was low quality by US standards.
Agreed re weirdness of # of books as a meaningful metric, and I suspect most educators would agree with us as well.