"...The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?”* and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there..."
This was partially solved by the internet and Google Books although there's still a lot of room for improvement. We really need to get all of the books in the world digitized and behind an API that allows anyone to access all of the content with some sane pricing scheme rather than charging per book. I doubt this will ever happen so the best we can hope for are the various efforts to pirate as many books as possible and make them available for download. It would be a dream to have a really good search over all of the written works of mankind though.
It shouldn't be, the effort with which something is produced has zero weight when judging its value. For books they should be rated based on their purpose. Non-fiction should be rated along dimensions of accuracy, new information, utility, clarity and absence of errors. Fiction should be rated on how entertaining and inventive it is among other things. If you want to subdivide further I'm sure you could come up with other meaningful criteria.
