@Georg-Prime Yeah it's kind of new. And MC is OP but his level progression is halved because of his quest/class. And he lost lot of time while reading an entire library.
And seeing how much this world is, if you talk to every NPC, visit any place and every town it'll take a lot of time before you hit the library.
it's not impossible to rush the library, at least two people did this, but only the mc did it while being heavily under-leveled (using quests that didn't give lots of XP) and doing only that.
Surely some people want to read all the books, but because of all the different things you can do in the game, the mc is very very likely be the first to do that. Because he purposely chooses an inefficient way of playing focused solely on books.
And it's normal to see mainly people who're interested in lvl-uping :
- The huge majority of people are interested in lvl-uping, because it's the core gameplay and because even story-driven players know that having an HL character help to unlock stories faster and easier.
- The rare people who don't care about level-upping are still in the first town, and very unlikely at the library.
- So the MC meet near nobody in the first town because he was at the library (he meet one person inside the library, surely more but they weren't important enough encounter to show them)
- And after the library, MC is OP and hunt in mid to high-level hunting ground, which means the only people he can meet are people who are mid to high level, which are people who cared about level upping.
- People who are focused on reading don't talk much which means it's not a meaningful interaction and doesn't need to be shown.
I am this kind of player who read all the books, talks to every NPC, listen to all the music and do all the quest in a town before moving to the next one (less now) and what I noticed was that people who focused on only one task was far more advanced than me in it. So yeah... a library full of books? I would surely read something like ten of them at a time while doing other things (because books don't give much once you level-upped) I will read all of them in the end, but someone who ONLY does that will read all the book far before me. And in your case (and near every players case), I'm sure it'll be the same.