I would assume they picked the examples because it's singularityhub. Most of their readers are likely to be technology/gadget centric and a message about more tech centric activities was probably expected to resonate better than a message about something as "old fashioned" as reading a book.
Beside, be honest. What percentage of the population do you think actually spends more time reading books than watching TV and surfing the internet?
BTW: According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, watching TV accounted for more than half the total leisure time for Americans 15 years and older. (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm)
Try to imagine that same sentence with "to read a book" substituted for "to watch television, or, um, surf the internet". Hard, isn't it?
This is anti-technology bigotry. Pretty surprising at singularityhub.com, huh? That's how pervasive it is.