Your pc must be realy slow running if you perceive readin a book as long. It takes some ingame time and i havent directly compared craft time vs reading time at high focus. Construction has to be set up as you need tons of materials that may be returned after dissasembly (which you have to do as well).
First you set up a crafting area with all the mats. then you start crafting which takes more keystrokes then regular crafting which you can cue up with the repeat key. you ll have to either gather the huge ammounts of ressources first to cover all you constructions or dissasemble what you constucted before which both takes extra time.If you want to argue about this i am willing to do a test run with books and crafting and will compare the elapsed time.(both ingame time and rl time passed). if your doing this just for the sake of lvling construction by all means do not do it. go explore search books for it find other stuff along the way and read them in your down time.
If all you want to do in your playthrough is building . then You can use the crafting method. You ll save time on searching books and you ll be able to get skill lvls on things you ll want to craft anyway. if your interested in doing anything else you should not craft that skill up. Its a waste of your time.