Reading Online: Updating the State of the Discipline

Reading is a core concern of book historians, and never more so than now as the internet’s characteristic interactivity expands the reader’s role. This article takes the reader as its central focus to examine not just uses of the internet to comment upon reading after the fact, but also how online reading formations mediate the act of reading itself. The burgeoning phenomenon of online book communities puts readers into relationships in which categories of geographical location, age, appearance, and (to a large extent) socio-economic status are irrelevant, permitting a “purer” form of book talk than traditional embodied settings. Infinite Summer, a 2009 online book club in which members supported each other in reading David Foster Wallace’s (in)famously labyrinthine novel Infinite Jest (1996), documents reading as a formative process, in which readers are facilitated by networked technologies to intervene in the process of other readers’ meaning-making. Other online reading experiments work against the internet’s characteristic disembodiment of the literary text by fetishizing the auratic power of the individual book copy. Such online reading formations force book historians to reassess conceptions of reading as a private, solitary, and intellectually hermetic practice by foregrounding readers’ public, social, and dialogical interpretations. The internet provides a capacious archive of mass reading practices, precisely time- and date-stamped, to which readers previously excluded from valorised interpretative communities have far greater means of access. However, it is also true that many activities willingly engaged in by online readers are commercially valuable to the book industry, whether as market research, free publicity, or talent-spotting. This prompts reconsideration of some of the orthodoxies regarding the history of reading.