“We”, speaking for yourself, and scientists of your intellectual attitude. But many other scientists, in addition to reading primary literature, also read books by other scientists. If a certain kind of scientist has no desire ever to read a book by another scientist, I have no interest in forcing him at gunpoint to do so. But the most intellectually interesting scientists, in my experience, both read and write books. Time and again I have found in these debates that I get along best with those scientists who enjoy reading scientific books, and end up in conflict with those scientists who think that all that is necessary to be a good scientist, beyond doing one’s own experiments, is to keep up with the most recent journal literature. It’s the same conflict I end up in with religion scholars who think that all you need to be a good scholar of religion is minute attention to the latest articles published in their subfields.
As I said before, the issue here is not arts vs. science, but a difference in temperament, between minds that instinctively try to put together broad syntheses (like Darwin, which is why he wrote books, or the founders of the Modern Synthesis, Mayr etc., all of whom set forth that synthesis in seminal books in the 1940s), and minds that prefer to work on smaller, bite-size problems that yield definite right or wrong answers. In the larger scheme of things, good science needs both types of mind, but those with synthetic gifts are generally better communicators to the non-scientific world, and hence are more likely to be socially and culturally influential.