Readers9 Advisory Service: New Directions

The old-style readers' advisory idea lost support for various reasons, but recent thinking about popular culture and pleasure-reading has set the stage for a new emphasis on helping readers find books. There is still a key role for read ers' advisors to play in public libraries-but for a new breed of readers' advisor who pays attention to both elements in the reading transaction: the reader and the book. Over one hundred open-ended, qualitative interviews on reading for pleasure provide evidence about how books help people, how readers choose books, and what readers like and do not like about fiction provision in libraries. It is argued that, by paying more attention to the ways in which people actually choose books, librarians could set up ways to facilitate these selection processes. This article gives some practical sugges tions for making libraries more helpful places for readers who are looking for books to read.