Full agree - and I've adopted a similar reading strategy. Full read of first and last chapters, skim the rest and should be done in no more than an hour. If there's a systems diagram or algorithm you want to dig into, make a note and maybe do that later.
Most of these books should be blog posts; ironically (?) the ones that were blog posts extended into full books tend to be the better ones!
Good observation. Off the top of my head all the 37 signals stuff (which started as blogs) were great when they became books. Morgan Housel too.