Except that a lot of people read these books for the entertainment value of the anecdotes, and a lot of people enjoy feeling self-important for having read long books.
Not just self-important, but the anecdotes are designed to be bite-sized to be easily retellable, like the 2016 NYT Abraham Wald/ beware survivorship bias on graphing bulletholes on WWII airplanes viz which locations were more damaging.
So you get a decade of "business nonfiction" bookstand fodder which is claims with high shock quality but often not relicable, mixed with anecdotes, to signal the reader's self-declared learnedness.
Combine this with the long-tailed nature of the statistic "the average American only reads one book a year" and it's frightening. I think Scott Galloway said sales of his e-book are >10x more than his paper book.
And during Covid lots of people got exposed for having fake bookshelf backdrops.
There was one Covid Zoom podcast (about economics?) with a middle-aged man sitting in front of a large set of bookshelves, housing row-upon-row of gnarly old books. The only recently-used book was lying flat on top of the other books.
