Fifty-five per cent of those polled for the survey, commissioned by Teletext, said they buy books for decoration, and have no intention of actually reading them.
I have no problem with that. Books can be beautiful objects, even books consisting exclusively of advertisements, like this one spotted at Design Observer.
Plus, sometimes the practice can have unexpected and delightful results. When I was a teenager, my parents bought a batch of books in order to fill an underpopulated shelf in the living room. They were part of the complete collected works of Camilo José Cela, noted spanish writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. They had sober and nondescript covers; when at last I got to inspect them, I found out to my delight that most of the lot consisted in a multi-volume dictionary of erotism edited by Cela, which I proceeded to read exhaustively in the next few weeks, with adolescent eagerness (no Internet then).
I am reminded of the character in Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler who never reads books, but uses them as material for his strange sculptures. And also of the blind librarian (a clear stand-in for Borges) in Gene Wolfe's Shadow Of The Torturer:
I was sitting there, as I said, and had been for several watches, when I came to me that I was reading no longer. For some time I was hard put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of certain odors and textures and colors that seemed to have no connection with anything discussed in the volume I held. At last I realized that instead of reading it, I had been observing it as a physical object. The red I recalled came from the ribbon sewn to the headband so that I might mark my place. The texture that tickled my fingers still was that of the paper in which the book was printed. The smell in my nostrils was old leather, still wearing the traces of birch oil. It was only then, when I saw the books themselves, when I began to understand their care.
(Gene Wolfe: Shadow Of The Torturer)
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