My husband would say you've described me to a T - at least until a pair of high-maintenance babies seriously curtailed my reading during their waking hours (which was pretty much all of them, ugh). In my younger days, I was never without a book in hand or pocket, whether at school, walking down the street, or (definitely, and still) brushing my teeth. I would suspect compulsive reading suggests there's nothing happening in the real world that's remotely as interesting as what's going on in the books. Which is not inherently a problem, in my highly biased view
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But there's a difference between finding books really interesting, and finding the real world utterly intolerable. If your son prefer books to un-engaging and unrewarding work, or resists sudden interruptions when deep in a story, well, who can blame him? As long as he can also happily put the books down to engage with those people or activities he does enjoy.
But if he wants to avoid the real world under any circumstances, that suggests there's things going on out there he can't deal with, and you need to figure out what they so you can help him learn to interact, navigate and cope. Is he finding social interactions a negative experience? Experiencing sensory overload? Is there something "out there" that doesn't feel safe? Is it possible there's a processing deficit that's causing some sensory intake (such as visual or auditory) to be providing wrong information, so he doesn't trust one his senses and is therefore avoiding relying on it?
For my own younger self, there were no extra Es (that I can quite pin down, at least!). Just a kid with little in common with her peers, poor social skills, utterly unengaged at school and with limited imagination - so whenever I was bored, I lived in my books. (random note: An odd thread last year about aphantasia - the inability to picture things in one's head - made me realize that's me. Perhaps a contributor to always seeking external stimulus of books over internal thoughts?) I guess it comes back to - does he prefer a book over boring things, or over all things?
