I'm conflicted on the issue.
On the one hand, it'd probably provide some beneficial insight. On the other, I like jumping into a book not knowing what I might be getting myself into.
Thoughts?
I may not wait that long, but I tend to read them after I've delved in enough to know that the book is worth my efforts.
I kind of thought the same thing. But then the intro to The Fountainhead gave away how a relationship panned out, and I was a little bummed because I was curious. Not to say that's the most important point of the book, but I trust the author's judgement in leaving us to find out when she wanted us to.
The reason I usually read them after, is because often the intro talks about stuff that I have no context for until I read the book. This is strange to me, as introductions are supposed to lend context to what will then be read. Sometimes though, I do it your way. Especially if the introduction is considered notable.
It depends on what the introduction covers. If it's talking mostly about the book at hand, than I'll usually just skip over it. But if it's talking about the author's life and providing societal and cultural context for the book and when it was written, then I'll read the introduction.
Usually you can't get too far into the intro before realizing it's one or the other, yeah?
Look at it this way, when you watch a good movie, you're left with "wow, that was a good movie. It all worked." When you watch a bad movie, you have "that was a bad movie. It didn't work." it's much easier to fix something that's broken than something that isn't. So when you see a bad movie, if you contemplate what the filmmakers could have done to make it a GOOD movie, you stand a fair-to-middlin' chance of improving your craft.
Depends. Sometimes the intros to books require you to be intimitely aware of the stuff going on in the book, making it worthless for someone who hasn't read the book to read it. I have a volume of Keats' poetry and I started reading the intro and realized that not only did the intro require a knowledge of Keats and his Poems, but also required a deep knowledge of the art of Poetry itself. I naturally had to skip that one because they were going into concepts that were far beyond where my head was at (I just wanted to read some poems from Keats!) The only way to really tell whether or not an intro is worth reading, funnily enough, is by reading it. Usually a few pages should let you know whether it's an intro like the one above or an intro that anyone new to the book could read. So, it's back to: depends.
Are introductions usually written by someone other than the author?
I don't think it's constant. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
I skip them. If I love the book I might read it when I finish.