Books that are hundreds of pages long also exclude most from participating.
How scientists think does appear to be foreign to you. It is interesting that @swamidass has the same thoughts on this topic that I do:
“Most of what scientists do entirely ignores book. The vast majority of scientific work is not books, and when it is, it is years too late to be useful to our practice in most cases.”–Joshua
@swamidass goes on to say that books are only rarely helpful to scientists. You may think they are amazing, but most scientists find books on science to be much less important than technical papers.