I've got a bookshelf with hundreds of books arranged by color (design nerd). My wife and I have dozens of books queued up on our Kindle. Our kids read something like a novel a week. We regularly leave the public library with our arms full. We are a family of readers.

[image error]I'm friends with a lot of readers, too. Two of them are marketing profs at my alma mater, West Texas A&M University. As part of a research project, they're administering a survey not of the types of books we read, or how we read them (paper, e-book), or where we read them, but WHY we read. What are the motives behind our reading? Do we do it purely for pleasure? For entertainment? For some kind of spiritual or intellectual enrichment? Or a combination of all those things?

I'm interested in the answers to those questions, too, so I've agreed to help them out by sending my friends to the survey. It is especially focused on how religious beliefs and/or personal spirituality influence your motives for reading. That's why the first page of questions is about your religious beliefs. The second is about your reading habits.

If you have a couple of spare minutes, would you mind responding to the survey? It takes less than five minutes, and everyone who completes it will be entered in a drawing to win a new Amazon Kindle Touch.

I appreciate it. My friends at WT appreciate it. And my fellow writers appreciate it. Because they more we know about WHY you read, the better we can produce stuff you'll like.

The Reading Motives Survey