I live on the move so returning books on time would be a bitch but I’m considered a great source by librarians, as I give away the kind of books for which they usually have more demand than budget (YA, science fiction, fantasy, all of which they pretty much can’t buy unless they’re best-sellers already). And I’m happy to give information on target ages/mindsets and stuff like that, as “YA” gets lumped as a single genre when it’s actually a ton of different genres, aimed at people at a not-so-specific range of maturity.
No offense taken, at all.
I do read before I buy, but it’s not really limited to the first few pages, necessarily. And I always read the blurb telling me what it’s about.
It’s not that I can always tell by the first few pages, or that I make any real judgments. It’s just that, if the book doesn’t capture me quickly, I don’t continue reading. There are plenty of other books–or, indeed, other forms of entertainment–that will.
Does that mean I’ll ultimately like the book at the end? No. But that would then require me to read the whole book before purchasing. Granted, I have done that, but a book has to be really good for that to happen. Or I have to have pirated it online and then wanted to make it legit after the fact.
Probably a near-endless waiting list, which is what got me out of the habit to begin with.
ETA: Just saw the new page after posting. Agree with BigT. A novel may go bad after starting well, but if it starts poorly, my limited time on Earth does not include hours to see if it gets better. There is too much else to get to.
Actually I used to get books based on size …,I can read up to 12-1500 wpm so I was reading those thick multi generational romance sagas …used to drive the librarians nuts …
For a while I bought them based on price-per-word: I’d have 6h train trips, two-way, and penny novels actually managed to provide more words for a lower cost than “normal” ones 
This reminded me of how in “The Manchurian Candidate”, Bennet Marco (Frank Sinatra) bizarrely had someone send him random books on all kinds of weird subjects. Just now I tried to find some cite on what exactly he said about them (he listed some of the weird subject matter), and though my google-fu is usually pretty decent, I could not find it! In fact, it was only on maybe my fourth or fifth set of search terms that I found one blog post mentioning some of the titles (*Diseases of Horses, Modern French Theater, *and Jurisprudential Factor of Mafia Administration) but not the script’s verbiage about having them chosen at random. Though at least now I know I didn’t imagine it! It’s stuff like that that makes me realize the world, or at least the internet, is not as vast as I sometimes assume.
Yes.
I have never once read pages of a book as a risk mitigation strategy before buying it. I generally buy books if I know the author, or have read a review of the book, or am particularly interested in the subject matter.
There are only two books that I bought this way but couldn’t finish. One was Neuromancer. By all logic I should have loved that book but I just could not imagine the story in the theater of the mind due to the writing style. I am not saying it wasn’t a good book, but the style just isn’t compatible with how my brain works. The second was On Such a Full Sea, which seemed to ramble on too long with nothing happening to move the story forward.
So two fails out of hundreds of books, I’ll take that chance.
I use the library all the time, and all my previously stated “pre-filtering” habits still apply. I just don’t like investing the time to partially read something and then get to a part that makes me remember that I read it twenty years ago. Now, there are many books that can be worth re-reading, but most are not.
I’m in the same boat as many( or several, anyway ) - I’ve never, ever previewed a book to see if I’d like it. I’ve only rarely done so with movies - I think that exclusively applies to random stuff I’ve run across on TV that I know nothing about.
I was going to say I don’t buy the “first five pages” thing, but I’ll amend that to “it wouldn’t work for me.” For one I’ve run across a number of books that I ended up liking only after digging into them a bit, for two I’m not really enormously picky. When I started reading loads of SF around 6th grade one of my primary access points was dumpster diving for remaindered books behind a bookstore. I’d get arm fulls of books with no covers and sometimes( when both covers had come off )would even have to guess at genre based on a title.
And three I don’t generally treat time as a precious resource. Yeah, there are thousands of good books I’ll never get to. So what? That is always going to be the case no matter what you do and even shitty experiences can be interesting ones. Trying to min/max your life just seems like way more effort than I’m willing to expend :).
I buy from authors I know I generally like, recommendations from meatspace friends, occasionally based on blurbs( like recommended books on a store shelf )or reviews, and not infrequently from SDMB recommendation threads. Once in a blue moon I’ll buy one just because of the cover description. That last for example is how I discovered A. Lee Martinez and Christopher Moore, who will never, ever win literary awards, but who usually keep me at least modestly amused. The first book I ever picked out on my own as a little kid( my father bought it for me )was Michael Moorcock’s The Runestaff, which I got because I liked the cover art :D. It was a decent first stab.
Finally searching out books with ‘literary merit’ is of no particular interest to me. I don’t really give a shit if something is good literature. I just want to be entertained. I’ll stop and watch Big Trouble in Little China on cable just as happily as The Godfather. And if I’m being honest on many/most if not necessarily all days I’d rather be reading some disposable Alan Dean Foster novel than David Foster Wallace.
This is something hard for me to wrap my head around–reading 25 words per second. Each word for the lenght of time as a movie frame. A minimal lenght novel in less than a half an hour.
Many, many times. When Goodreads send an email with e-books on sale I usually purchase a few if I have not already read them. Also when a favorite author writes a book I just purchase it.
:eek:
One thing I’d like to add to that is that I think it comes from having grown up with books always coming from libraries, so of course I would read them while I was there. When I moved on to book stores, they leave the books where you can read them, so I presumed that was the purpose, like a library. Then it was online, where they have the preview.
I’m actually surprised that people who read a lot don’t bother. I’m not saying they always have to–if you know an author is good, there’s no point in doing so. But I’m surprised some say they never do this.
I probably read at 1200 wpm or so*. I wonder if reading speed/difficulty influences ones approach to books in general. I don’t read any of the content of books I’m thinking about reading. I depend on reviews, cover blurbs, and recommendations from friends. I think their may be two reasons related to speed. 1) If I read for a minute, this is literally 2-3 pages (at least- reading fast is like driving fast, sometimes it takes longer to stop because of momentum) and the potential to spoil the book is potentially high. 2) The investment of getting through half the book before making a decision is only a couple of hours (my rule of thumb is about 100 pages an hour).
**The last time I tested for reading speed was in my junior year of high school, which led to my being kicked out of class. (It was the first year we were allowed to take electives, and I saw “Speed Reading” was offered. Having read that President Kennedy had been a “page at a glance” reader, this had become an ambition of mine. I figured this class would teach me to do this. At the first class, the teacher passed out a few pages of text with a short test (for comprehension) at the end. We then self-timed our reading and took/scored the test. My result (having correctly answered the rather simple questions) was 1200 WPM. We turned in our tests to the teacher, who looked through them. She asked me to step outside, where she explained that the purpose of the class was to bring students’ reading up to a few hundred wpm and that nothing she was going to teach would be of any benefit to me. She suggested that I consider this class a free period from now on and I should be on my way)
I just opened a book I haven’t read yet (Dendera) in Moon+ Reader Pro and read the first chapter, then exited. It shows my reading speed (which was at my normal pace) to be 254 words per minute. Anything faster than that would feel like rushed work, not entertainment.
It really doesn’t feel rushed. Being self-taught, I can’t precisely describe the process, but my understanding is that at these speeds we are no longer reading words and stringing them together. Instead we are pulling big “chunks” of text (maybe even multiple lines) and ingesting them whole. My brain isn’t processing words faster, it is actually doing a different kind of processing. So the number of steps per minute and the time per step may not be more than you are performing, it’s just that the steps are completely different.
I believe you. I would however be curious to see the results of a reading comprehension test administered both to a group of people who read as you do, and another group matched in overall verbal IQ but who reads conventionally, after both groups have read the same unfamiliar text. I’m not saying I know what the results would be, only that I would be interested in seeing them.
Well, as I said, I’m self taught (if growing up reading voraciously can be called teaching). I don’t think I can slow down, at least not without losing my immersion and enjoyment.
I also read, review, and occasionally edit peer-reviewed scientific literature. I am slower when reading these papers, but even then, I tend to read things twice instead of slowing down to read them once. (besides, there are pictures! :D)
I read for enjoyment and won’t enjoy if I don’t get the nuances in the writing. I just think (without any firm proof) that I read in a fundamentally different manner from word by word readers.