tldr: do/can you read at work?

Dan Luu has a great article, 'How I Learned to Program', in which he writes:

"I asked if I could expense books and read them at work. This seemed perfectly normal because a lot of other people did the same thing, and there were at least two people who averaged more than one technical book per week, including one person who averaged a technical book every 2 or 3 days"

this sounds 1) awesome! 2) fantastical; I cannot imagine pitching this to management and cannot management being ok with it. but maybe it's more common than I imagine, or more common in certain sectors (Luu was working at a chip design company).