Do people read programming books to find reasons to become interested in programming? Seems to me, once they've picked up a book, they're already interested. "Preaching to the choir" seems like an apt phrase at this point.
Ask a publisher - I'm just someone who reads the occasional publisher's blog - but the answer is "yes". Browsers will pick up a book and scan the cover, the preface, the first chapter, etc. to decide whether your book is worth reading, and therefore worth buying.
And, yes, even literate people who know nothing about a field will pick up books and try them to see if they are inspired to learn more. People who aren't linguists try The Language Instinct; people who aren't physicists pick up Hawking or the popular lectures of Richard Feynman; lots and lots of non-historians read popular histories (think: Stephen Ambrose); and I wouldn't be where I am today if it weren't for writers like Martin Gardner who labored to translate mathematics for young, unspecialist audiences.
And then we have programming. Friends and relatives of mine who have never programmed ask me for a book that will tell them what programming is about so that they can see if they are interested, and I never know what to say. The best preface I know is in SICP, but that's like handing The Feynman Lectures on Physics to someone who wants to know how their car works. The first few pages are great but then it gets scary hard.
This stuff is important. I read a lot of books on BASIC and Pascal and assembly programming when I was a kid, but I never really found anything that put programming into perspective. Math and science had a grand, sweeping narrative that was apparent even to a kid, but programming seemed to be about making boxes blink. And this is still how it is in the popular imagination, even for adults. Tell people you're a mathematician or a physicist and they'll think you're a genius; tell them you're a programmer and they'll ask how worried you are that your job will be outsourced to faraway countries.
What shocked me about SICP was the persuasiveness of the introduction, even after years of programming. And it's much closer to the author's writing than the cut-n-dry O'Reilly stuff. I like it anyway :)
Programming books are by and large read by programmers. Complaining that the foreword doesn't sell programming well enough is like complaining that Hawking's papers don't contain enough cheerleading for first-grade science students.
