What if books were illegal?

If books were illegal, the world would be very dumbed down. And I’m not talking about just fiction books, I’m talking about medical journals, research documents, etc. I think that we would lose a lot of the advancements we have made. Society had come so far and I believe that that is mostly credited to books. Without books, we would have no knowledge of what people in the past had done. Word of mouth is a great tool but it isn’t very accurate. We lose something along the way when Bill told Sara that Mary told him that Jack was working on a new way to do surgery. I think that everyone has played the game telephone, the phrase gets so distorted after so many people hear it and relay the message. Without books, it’s very difficult to verify your information, especially if the supposed source is dead. A lot of the information we still use today is due to someone, long dead, that has given us those words. If they were never able to write them down, it would strongly change the way that society has advanced. We might not have ever even made the computer, the MRI, the lightbulb.