Study guides - do students read them?

Whenever I browse the academic shelves in bookshops, I am struck by the proliferation of student study guides. These books are full of advice on time management, writing essays, referencing, analysing arguments, and so on. They usually include numerous exercises that students are invited to engage with in order to develop their skills. In Waterstones yesterday, I saw an addition to this oeuvre, a book advising psychology students about doing their final year projects. Among other things, this advised about all the different methodologies that are open to researchers.

I can't help wondering: do students actually read these books? I find it easy to imagine that students purchase these books because they obviously want to get good grades, but given that it is often something of a challenge to get students to read materials for seminar groups I can't help suspecting that study guides do little more than gather dust. To be fair, even for the most diligent student an undergraduate degree tends to keep them more than busy enough if they do all the things they're meant to do for their modules. Some study guides are thicker than the other textbooks we steer them towards. I'm not dissing the contents of study guides, which mostly seem fine to me. I just wonder whether they really get used (excepting perhaps where such books are required reading on a study skills module).