Addiction is when something takes over your life to a degree that has the potential to damage your social relations and your job. If books do that, it will definitely be seen as bad.

The difference between books and drugs is that liking books in a non-problematic way is generally seen as good while many people will call anyone who takes certain drugs an "addict" and see them in a negative light, even though they may take these drugs responsibly and without damaging other aspects of their life.

The sacred texts

The ruins that we see today often didn't stand there as ruins for 2000 years. For example, the most iconic ruin of Athens, the Parthenon temple, continued to be used, first as a Christian church, then as a mosque, for centuries (making some small alterations to it like adding a minaret). No need to tear down a perfectly good building if you can still use it.

It only became a ruin after being damaged in a war, and for the next 150 years, the Ottomans couldn't be bothered to either rebuild it nor to tear it down. Both would be a lot of work, and they didn't need the space that bad, so they just used the rubble to build a smaller mosque inside the ruins and call it a day.

Then, Greece became an independent nation, and the ruins of Ancient Greece were of huge importance to their national identity, so they removed the mosque and everything else that had been added after antiquity, and made an effort to preserve what was left of the ancient temple. What we see today is the result of that effort.

Similar stories exist for nearly all ancient ruins in European cities - they continued to be used and were integrated into newer buildings for centuries, and then beginning in the 19th century people started to remove the newer buildings, uncovering what was left of the ancient buildings, and preserving these leftovers (or sometimes attempting to reconstruct them).

In the books, there's also a (somewhat) long setup for a literally shitty joke; in book 1 >! Twin Lannister !< is introduced, and it is mentioned offhand that some people joke about how he's probably >! shitting gold. !< Towards the end of book 3, >! he's shot while taking a dump, and his killer dryly notes that he did not, in the end, shit gold. !<

>Until we figure out how to produce only female calves.

We have figured it out. We can sort sperm into X- and Y-sperm with a reliability >90%. It's actively being used in dairy production. However, the female calves are still usually slaughtered as there's no demand for an exponentially growing number of dairy cows; as far as I could gather, the benefit for a dairy production is mainly in that birthing a male calf is more dangerous for the cow.