Believe it or not, it’s actually the premise of E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, a sci-fi short story published in 1909. And that’s only one of several books that predicted the future.

A little over a year ago, in the aftermath of the most devastating rains the UAE has witnessed, UAE-based Bookends saw 14,000 of its books get destroyed. To the co-founders themselves, the extent of ...