Boring Book

Personally, I don't buy books about coin series that I'm not particularly interested in, so I usually want to read any new coin book I buy from cover to cover. Sometimes a book will disappoint, and be much less interesting than I had anticipated. But I'll usually plod though it anyway. I've never been very good at "skim-reading".

As for what to do when you find a book to be less than half interesting, but still might need to refer to: it does in part rely on how well the book was written. Good writing, logical layout and (most importantly) good indexing are essential in trying to use a book that you've never actually read. If a book lacks these things, I'm afraid you're going to have to actually read through it if you're going to get any benefit out of it.

A book might be full of all sorts of fascinating and useful information, but if you can't use it to get at the information you need to know, when you need to know it, then that book is just taking up space on your shelf. I don't know about you, but I don't have anywhere near enough storage space in my house to house very many coin books which I can't or won't use.