This has been my experience too. However, I found that changing the book club to “article club” where we all read one interesting technical article worked quite well. I have been running such a club with fortnightly meetings for over 3 years now.
I guess that wouldn't be unreasonable if the content is work related and certainly helps with attendance, but I'm not sure if that would fly within all corporations.
I've approved or started (or both) this sort of thing on company time before, at more than one place.
For context, this was typically early stage R&D, and many/most of the employees had some academic background, though that ranged from "decades ago" to "we just hired you after a masters degree".
In this setting, it's a pretty natural continuation of the common "journal club" approach in academic research groups. It spreads the effort around, helps the team stay on top of new work, and generally improves professional development - if done well. It does take a bit of effort to keep fresh.
The trick to make it sustainable is to make at 3-month calendar of covered papers from multiple sub-areas (e.g. data management to machine learning, new programming languages to compiler topics) and share that widely. Not every topic is relevant to everyone, so naturally each topics will only attract a subset of the crowd beyond a small number of open-minded champions, but that's okay.
While in theory, everybody thought it's a good idea, not everyone had time to read it, and when it came down to it, everybody just preferred to work on their regular tasks. In the end, nobody wants to risk delaying a promised deadline because of a book club.
So it all fizzled out within a month...
Maybe because I've been a reader my whole life, but I can't imagine getting value out of reading a chapter a week. It's rare for me to read less than 1 book per week. Even if it were a technical or educational book, one chapter at a time is a miserable way to read something.
(In a previous startup, we had cross-department tech talks, partly because we had some really specialized problems, so it was useful for, say, releng to hear about what the ML team thought was interesting, and vice versa, just for generally improving communication and reducing friction. We even threw in an occasional "lightning talk" session, which was popular, though it was as much for getting people comfortable giving talks so they could level up to bigger ones.)
1. Reading a whole book every one or two months works well when everyone has a regular reading habit. Without that people realize that they need to read a whole book in a few days before the meeting. That either led to poor quality discussions or people showing up without reading. 2. Reading book chapters every month was less demanding but the frequency of meetings was still too low for people to build reading into their routines. 3. At two weeks the frequency was high enough that it became a routine for the engineers. 4. We also reminded everyone one day before to read the article. Even if they had forgotten to read till then it is easy to find and hour in the day to read up. 5. If the reminder was too far in advance (say 3 days before) then people ignored the reminder.