Benefits of Reading for Pleasure
According to Coleman (31), academic or non-fiction reading has traditionally
been considered superior to reading for pleasure because of its education
value to library users, although the benefits of the latter have been well
documented by both scholars and librarians. First, concerns about levels ofliteracy in the UK have encouraged a range of initiatives in public libraries
to develop reading skills among both children and adults, focusing on the
pleasure to be gained from reading with others and/or losing oneself in a
book alone.1 The results of Oakey’s (19) work suggest that a program of
recreational reading can lead to improvements in vocabulary and spelling
abilities, for example