I do read huge swaths of information, just directly relevant to the questions that I have, and the things required to understand that information.

Don’t have to read a book on every US president to understand what happened during the Reagan administration. And if I’m primarily interested in the Cold War, I can focus on that subject and skip out on when Reagan was governor of California, or how he met his wife.

More than that I can get information from a variety of sources, including ones that disagree with each other and have different perspectives. That has absolutely enormous value when trying to comprehend something new…and isn’t often available in a single book.

You still can’t be lazy. Laziness is antithetical to truly acquiring knowledge. But it definitely can’t only come from a book.

There are very few non-fiction books that actually need their space to communicate their idea, instead of doing it in a chapter and filling the rest of it to reach some word-count target.

I've read plenty of scientific articles that read like the author is trying to fulfill a word count. There's definitely something to be said for brevity.