IN FORMER years the selection of textbooks was usually made by administrative or supervisory officers or by boards of education. In keeping with the trend toward democratic participation in determining educational policies and practices, there has, however, been a growing tendency to appoint committees of teachers to select the new textbooks. While in some cases these committees serve only in an advisory capacity, in most places their recommendations are accepted. Since the teachers who will actually use the books are vitally interested in selecting those which will best fit their needs, these committees are constantly on the alert to utilize any helpful new techniques of evaluation. The readability formulas developed by Dale and Chall' at Ohio State University, by Irving Lorge" at Columbia, and by Rudolph Flesch3 at Columbia offer a comparatively new technique which can be useful to the committees. The Dale formula is run by taking samples of approximately one hundred words about every tenth page. The words and sentences are counted. "Hard" words (those which do not appear on the Dale list) are counted. Computation using numbers provided furnishes a grade-score level which is averaged to find the reading-difficulty score of the entire book. Because more frequent samples are taken in this formula, it requires more time to run. The Lorge formula is run by selecting samples of the material at regular intervals. It is suggested that from 5 to io per cent of the book be sampled and that never less than five samples be used. Each sample must be at least a hundred words in length. The number of words, the number of sentences, and the number of prepositional phrases are counted. "Hard" words that do not appear on a given list are 'Edgar Dale and Jeanne S. Chall, "A Formula for Predicting Readability," Educational Research Bulletin, XXVII (January 21, 1948), 11--20, 28.