The brain of any child is like a sponge taking in knowledge. When the kids are small, their ability to perceive the world around them is extremely strong. Thereby, parents can help them to learn new things but at the same time they would need to direct their children at making their own decisions.
Nowadays, with the help of new interactive children's books of any format, children have a lot of opportunities to develop their skills at making own decisions at an early age.
Summary:
Making children read books would never give any good results, they would either start to hate those books or would have no pleasure reading them. Nowadays the Internet offers a wide range of Interactive books, where a child can participate in and learn new things about the world.