The purpose of this research was to find out the effect of preface reading before reading a book. In order to carry out this research I analyzed the preface of recommended books for children first. My research assignments were as follows: First, to find out how many recommended books for children contain preface. Second, to find out the different types of preface of recommended books for children. Subjects of this study were 537 books excluding unidentified 11 books among 548 books, which are recommended for children from grade 1 to 6. The list of recommended books were published by the Korean Childbook organization. For this research, I examined books whether they have preface and then categorized books by their subject, nationality, grade and the type of text. After this process, I categorized the books containing preface into four different types according to their content. The types are reading motivation, reading strategy, background knowledge and author's personal story. Findings of this research was as follows: First, the preface of 191 books out of 537 books included in the list of recommended books for children in the year 2007 were used as reading materials before reading. This takes up about 35.6 % of the entire books in the list. Second, the purpose of preface contains mostly to motivate children's reading, which makes up almost 88 % of its purpose, give background knowledge (72.8%), provide a strategy for book reading (33.5%) and to give author's personal story (23%). This indicates that reading preface of the book is an useful activity before reading a book for children.