Digital Social Reading: Sharing Fiction in the 21st Century

It is 2021, the major social media have been around for more than a decade, increasingly being used for reading-related activities, like organizing one’s own bookshelf, discussing novels, and reading book reviews. Still, there is no publication that tried to organize the precious knowledge generated by research about digital social reading (DSR), which is scattered among many volumes, journal articles, and blog posts, intersecting many different disciplines. I tried to do it in this book. Given its broad scope, it will necessarily attract legitimate critics by different parts, from scholars that will think it does not meet specific disciplinary expectations. I think that such an interdisciplinary approach is needed to understand the social, cultural, and pedagogical aspects of DSR. Aware that a synthesis done by a single person can easily overlook even important aspects of a phenomenon, I openly share my work hoping that a community review will help to improve it and make it more useful for other researchers, students, educators, and curious readers.