My opinion: seriously, blogs should count as minibooks and everytime I read a particularly good and in depth blog or something that elicits the "I'm smarter for reading that" moment, I'm going to keep a tally. That tally I'll consider a chapter of a book. At 300 chapters, I'll count that as a book. Let's see how many books I have after a year. I think it'll be around 100.
I am rediscovering what a joy it is to read books. It seems it does take a lot of work to write well. Blog posts, almost by definition, are not meant to be well-written in terms of depth and succinctness.
But, maybe I'm just reading all the wrong blogs.
There are lots of good blogs out there. I think a substantial number of bloggers end up getting published in books, and a lot of good writers blog. There is a lot of information out there, my primary point is that you don't have to consume it on parchment for it to count.
For me, blogs are micro books. And i have daily "aha" moments, that i cant get from books at this frequency.
And if you start including video, (If the speech was converted to text), then lets just say my number is close to 2 or 300 if not more.
Ultimately it's about having many "i am smarter" moments
You’re reading the wrong books.
I suggest reddit.com/r/programming, Hacker News obviously, and YourVersion.com for finding new stuff to read based on your interests, and then you can usually find more to read without too much trouble. There is always more!
The other point you illustrate is that most reading on the internet is scattered into bits and pieces. Going through all of those topics in one morning is too much, for my brain anyway. I'd much rather read on one of those topics at length and work out some problems and code. Reading small posts here and there may make me feel smarter, but I'm not convinced it actually makes me smarter. I ask myself, "How does knowing this change my expected behaviour or my anticipation of the world?".
(I'm not affiliated with the site, I've just found it to have a good signal-to-noise ratio.)