Making Choices: What Readers Say About Choosing Books to Read for Pleasure

This paper analyzes 194 open-ended interviews with committed readers who read for pleasure, focussing in particular on intervieweesʹ responses to questions about how they choose and how they reject a book. The analysis suggests that a comprehensive model for the process of choosing books for pleasure-reading must include five related elements that are examined in the paper: the reading experience wanted by the reader; alerting sources the reader uses; elements in a book that the reader takes into account in making book choices; clues on the book itself; and costs to the reader in getting access to a particular book. The paper concludes with implications of this research for librarians in the intermediary role of matching reader to book.