Good for you, that’s great. Well done.
It’s just that the vast majority of self help books are in fact aimed at exactly these people. Because they keep buying them and reading them instead of improving their lives. If you actually start working on your life you’re eventually going to reach a point where you don’t need any more self help books, that’d be bad news for the self help book publishing industry.
It means exactly what it says. The huge difference between “self help books” and the other things you’ve listed is based on their categories. I guess I’ll go through them one by one.
1984 or Harry Potter - Though you can of course study them these are primarily entertainment, we’re generally not expecting much out of our entertainment other than engagement. You read them, you enjoy them, you finish them and while your life might be enriched and they leave you with fond memories finishing them is all there is to it.
History coursework - Teaching materiel reading these IS what you’ve set out to accomplish and of course to internalize the information contained within. Once you’re done reading them you’re mostly done with them.
The bible - Well this one’s a bit too versatile as it can fall into any and all the mentioned categories really. Not going to say anything definitive on this one.
Self help books - Also teaching materiel but as opposed to course work once you’ve read them you also need to apply the information learnt within on your life. The reading of these is a fairly small portion of gaining anything useful out of them. Using the information to change your life is a huge undertaking, that’s the part where the majority of people fail. Like reading a manual to a weight lifting machine, you gotta actually use the machine too.
Note that I said self help books can be read as entertainment too, in which case they fall in the same category as harry potter and that’s perfectly alright.
If you are indeed one of the very rare kind of person who does indeed read a self help book to find inspiration and tips and then actually manage to apply that information to your life for a positive change then all I can say is congratulations.