Several creativity-related quotes from R.J.Sternberg's 2006 paper "The Nature of Creativity":

People typically want others to love their ideas, but immediate universal applause for an idea often indicates that it is not particularly creative.

To be creative one must first decide to generate new ideas, analyze these ideas, and sell the ideas to others. In other words, a person may have synthetic, analytical, or practical skills but not apply them to problems
that potentially involve creativity. ... The skill is not enough: One first needs to make the decision to use the skill. ... ability to switch between conventional and unconventional modes of thinking is important to creativity.

There seems to be at least two questions associated with creativity. One: how do we spot a creative idea, if most often it is considered to be uninteresting? Two: how do we find environments that facilitate people's decisions to be creative?

Another interesting observation from the same paper:

...we had creative products of people of different ages rated for their creativity by raters of different age cohorts. We found informal evidence of cohort matching — that is, raters tended to rate as more creative products of creators of roughly their own age cohort.

References:
Sternberg R.J.(2006). The Nature of Creativity. Creativity Research Journal 2006, Vol. 18, No. 1, 87–98.

Guardian on social aspects of book purchase motivation:

Social competitiveness about which titles we read has become one of the new mass forces of the era and only middle-aged people are relatively free of it.

Driven partly by pressure from incessant literary prize shortlists, more than one in three consumers in London and the south-east admit having bought a book "solely to look intelligent", the YouGov survey says.

The biggest group, more than two in every five people, follows the traditional method of choosing their reading; relying on recommendations from close family and friends.