My colleague, Julie Gilbert, and I did a study on this (tl:dr - college 
students love to read for pleasure but mostly don't because they are busy).

"Reading, Risk, and Reality: Undergraduates and Reading for Pleasure," 
with Julie Gilbert, College & Research Libraries 72.5 (September 2011): 
474-495.
http://crl.acrl.org/content/72/5/474.full.pdf

You may also be interested in this essay collection:
The Slow Book Revolution: Creating a New Culture of Reading on College 
Campuses and Beyond ed. Meagan Lacy. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries 
Unlimited, 2014.

Here's a site about a one-credit course we offer in the spring ...
https://readingshop.wordpress.com/
Small enrollment, but fun.

And lecture notes/syllabus for a January term course I last taught in 2013
https://booksandculture13.wordpress.com/
Big enrollment and fun, but in January you aren't competing with organic 
chem and psych!

We also started a book swap just  before finals (we seed it with our own 
hand-me-downs) and put student reviews into a LibraryThing catalog which 
would probably work better if they looked at it for ideas (see busy, above).

We tried creating a curated fiction collection for two years because new 
students kept asking "why don't you have any fiction?" - uh, we do, but 
it's hard to browse - but it got little use so we merged it back into 
the general collection.

I suspect our most effective RA efforts have been displays for YA and 
graphic novels and displays of fun books recommended by popular faculty 
members (with their name and choices on bookmarks in the books) but we 
haven't kept close track.

Barbara Fister

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