By way of an epilogue

When we talk about social reading we now know perfectly well that we are referring to the communication established among readers for the purpose of sharing comments about a book by means of different procedures and tools (annotations, comments, tags, ratings, quotations and citations, tips, and so on), each of which have varying degrees of impact. However, the problem is tracing out the exact conceptual space that reader intervention in texts should occupy and defining the nature of reader participation from a semantic standpoint above and beyond the mere sociological value of reader interaction. The analysis of reader intervention on the various social reading platforms shows that comments and annotations tend to be mostly denotative and assertive rather than evaluative or contrastive of opinions already expressed. However, the latter is what is truly needed to enrich the conversation.

This leads us to wonder, as linguist Nora Kaplan does, ‘How social is social reading?’ In a recent investigation (2013), Kaplan analysed reader comments on four Spanish-language social reading websites (Lecturalia, Quelibroleo, Anobii and Bibliotheka) and an open Facebook group (‘Libros que recomendarías a un amigo mientras tomas un café’ [Books you would recommend to a friend over a cup of coffee]). She analysed representative examples of comments from a corpus of selected comments.

She identified the following units and patterns of interaction: (a) Exchanges: Initiation-Continuation-Close: I-S-C): Chronological sequences centered on specific topics (adopted from the notion of patterns in text); (b) Interventions: Interruption and Turn-taking; and (c) Statements: The written words, including emoticons and text-type expressiveness. In order to clearly define her physical units of analysis, she borrowed Bolívar’s notion of an ‘orthographic sentence’ (2005), i.e. a segment of physical text, between sentence separating punctuation.

In Kaplan’s interpretation of the data and explanation of her findings, the virtual communities she examined were formed on the basis of shared values and common affiliation, links which are reinforced by the discourse. In order to put this into practice, the participants in the exchanges regarding different genres resort to strategies of evaluative courtesy and mitigation in order to preserve their social reputation, intervene successfully and re-establish the balance in cases of conflict. On a sematic-discursive level, the values of Attitude, Grading and Compromise expressed or evoked in the posts are used for the pragmatic purposes of image-building and (dis)courtesy. The predominance of the values of Affection and Appreciation/reaction over those of Appreciation/evaluation found in Kaplan’s corpus showed that what virtual social reading communities share the most are common feelings about the ideas expressed by others rather than their own ideas about reading. This concurs with what Zappavigna (2012) found in another recent study.

The results obtained by Kaplan also suggest that, in virtually every case of information exchange, phatic messages outnumber any messages that might either provide information about or enter into dialogue about books and reading. Thus, Kaplan’s results concur with those of other researchers who have tackled social network and digital culture from a sociological perspective. Recent studies have shown that the phatic culture of on-line communication is characteristic of the interconnected and decontextualised society of late modernity (Miller, 2008). It would seem that what is important is to ‘be in contact’ with others rather than transmit content to others; what is important is to cause a certain impression on others, to outwardly show a certain self-image while protecting one’s own image and that of others.

Thus, category 2 in Stein’s taxonomy (2010) does not seem at all different from other forms of Web 2.0 communication. This is perhaps why the inclusion of the hyperonym ‘social reading’ in the category would not really be justified. It is likely that the category notes in the margins (category 4) is where the true meaning of ‘social reading’ lies.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the power of social networks to make authors and their works increasingly visible on a global scale is very important, even when the comments made about them on the Internet are negative. During the last few years, a number of authors have claimed that they have been the object of certain forms of censorship on the part of groups of readers who had conspired to post negative critiques and disfavourable comments about them (Jahjah, 2012b). The first news stories about this phenomenon were published in the Huffington Post, which ran a story about how organised gangs of readers targeted certain authors for the purpose of ruining their reputations. On the surface, this seems like a very improbable scenario, unlikely to pan out in a medium such as the Internet where audiences are so fragmented. However, on at least one social network specialising in reading, where such practices had taken place, another group of readers who wanted to bring an end to cyberbullying of authors established a website of their own called Stop GoodRead Bullies. One of its creators described their initiative as follows: ‘We launched the site Stop the GR Bullies, to show the public what is happening. It is a site where victims of the abuse can feel safe to post a comment anonymously or send us a private message, sharing their experience without threat of retaliation’ (Huffington Post, 2012).

This case shows the extent to which the misunderstood role of criticism can stoop, yet this kind of criticism will always be present on any type of social networking site on which users can post their comments freely without a moderator. In the case of GoodReads, at least one author (Meadows, 2012) discussed how differently readers and writers can react to harsh criticism. According to Meadows, often it is the authors who do not acknowledge the negative reader criticism, while other times it is the authors who, by participating in social networks directly, deter readers from commenting if their attitude is overly harsh.

What underlies this dispute is, as Jahjah points out (2012b), the structural contradiction that on the one hand publishers and platforms appeal to readers to participate in one way or another in the development of works, to comment on them with authors, and to freely express their opinions, while on the other hand online social reading sites are powerful author-promotional tools which can undoubtedly be called upon to defend authors’ interests, manoeuvre their titles into the most favourable of lights, and publicise paratexts favourable to authors’ goals. This is not to mention how slews of positive comments that simply replicate others, though with clever usage of synonyms, flood these sites, or how companies specialised in dynamising websites are often used by the likes of Amazon.com. John Locke, the first author to sell more than one million eBooks on Amazon.com, recognized that he hired 300 positive critical posts through GettingBookReviews.com, one of these specialised companies. Posted comments have become an essential part of on-line marketing for every type of product, a requisite for the new generations of consumers who demand clear and direct communication and contextualisation of product information (Kelly, 2013). Customer comments are powerful because unlike outdated advertising and marketing schemes they offer the illusion of truth. They seem to be vicarious and authentic personal testimonials, despite the fact that they can be bought and sold according to an age-old mercantile rationale that causes market distortion. Book publishers have resorted to using their highest-volume points of sale as the benchmark for their bestsellers lists, with a view to driving their titles up in the rankings (Lopez de Abiada and Peñate Rivero, 1997), so it should come as no surprise that similar strategies should arise for eBook marketing, given all the potentialities that current technology can afford against a backdrop of complacent new reading practices. In any case, reader criticisms have certainly become a powerful tool in the text transmission process and in the distribution chain; negative criticisms can turn others off to new titles but not consistently, as reader reception of such criticism depends on individual sensitivities and temperament. Allen Carr, for instance, was sharply criticized on Amazon.com for his short story collection entitled ‘Short Bus’.

Taking the negative criticism in his stride, Carr was neither shocked nor angry with the most impertinent of his readers. He created a contest for the ‘best’ one-star criticism of his work. Not many readers took him up on the challenge, but those who did reacted quickly:

This is an ironic response to the phenomenon that will become more and more ingrained as social reading becomes more widespread. Carr’s good-spirited intrusion in the new ecosystem was refreshingly sportsmanlike, yet it is deeply rooted in a long tradition among even the most canonical authors to receive his or her blows in a more or less genteel fashion. An example of such negative criticism to be taken in stride is this anecdote about Jane Austen recorded by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Diary (1861):

Or this comment on The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot, published in the New Stateman: ‘Mr. Eliot has demonstrated that he is capable of writing true verse without rhyme, but that is all. Elsewhere, he has cited very much, he has parodied and he has imitated. But his parodies are poor and his imitations low quality.’ After publishing Absalom, Absalom, The New Yorker dismissed Faulkner as a ‘minor talent’; The Great Gatsby was called an insignificant novel by the Springfield Republican. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 was described as follows by The New Yorker (1961): ‘Heller wallows in his own laughter and finally drowns in it. What remains is a debris of sour jokes, stage anger, dirty words, synthetic looniness, and the sort of antic behavior the children fall into when they know they are losing our attention.’ Virginia Woolf complains about James Joyce in her diary: ‘I finished Ulysses and it seems like a failure to me … The book is diffuse. It is brackish, pretentious and underbred… . ‘ Gertrude Stein found that Ezra Pound is ‘a village explainer, excellent if you were a villager, but if you were not, not’. Huxley, Hemingway, James, Proust and a long list of other now canonical authors were at one time or another lambasted by critics and colleagues.

What social reading sites have done is cast the net of criticism beyond the close-knit circles of literary legitimation and into broader external spheres. Tempting, innovative initiatives such as Dotdotdot (https://www.dotdotdot.me/) and Hipothes.is (http://hypothes.is/) are now luring readers in from further away. Dotdotdot is an independent platform designed for managing electronic books and articles on the Web, allowing users to access books in epub formats without DRM. It allows users to upload syndicated content from Google Reader, and all reader-produced interventions can be shared with the other users on the platform on Facebook or Twitter. The site has downloadable apps for iPad and iPhone.

Hypothes.is is an open-source semantic platform that allows users to collaboratively evaluate all sorts of academic materials. As indicated on the web page,

The philosophy behind Hypothes.is is laid out in the following 12 principles:

Social reading has a long row to hoe, a road strewn with obstacles: there is a lack of interoperability among applications; there is no across-the-boad integration of technologies among publishers; and there is the challenge of educating for digital literacy both in terms of knowledge and practice. In a study on digital reading devices (e-readers and Tablets) and their use, Fernández et al. (2013) found that only a small percentage of readers (20% of e-reader users, and 10% of Tablet users) employed the features that allowed them to personalise digital content and socialise with other readers via social reading platforms.

These results are not surprising. Jung-Yu Lai (2012) has pointed out that participating in social reading networks is complex and requires additional digital literacy skills and effort, well beyond what is required for simple text reading. Readers of electronic texts need to have competence in running computer programs and add-on abilities that not every reader is willing to invest time and effort in developing. Studies into the acceptance of new technologies suggest that many external variables end up influencing user behaviour and their attitudes towards new technologies. One of the most powerful of these external variables is the perceived usefulness of e-readers and Tablets in terms of their ergonomics, usability and compatibility with other devices.

Studies of e-reading device usage indicate that they are mostly used for recreational rather than professional purposes and for the purposes of experimentation or exploration of their possibilities. The Accenture study (2012) shows that the most widespread use of these devices is indeed as recreational tools, with professional usage lagging far behind.

In the context of recreational use of e-readers and Tablet PCs, annotation and margin comment functions are especially appealing, as they offer a significantly different functionality with respect to analogue reading.

Reading is for many a recreational activity and every text begs to be commented on. It is difficult to find online news or blog posts, for instance, that do not offer a space to leave a comment or that have not already been commented on, whether positively or negatively. The problem is not so much with how comments are made, but with why more readers do not choose to comment.

With printed texts, the only chance to make comments was by underlining, highlighting and making margin notes. Printed books with marginalia became a sort of palimpsest that could only be interpreted by their owners, who held the key to the interpretative process, providing that the marking and the subsequent interpretation were done within a reasonable timespan. The margins were also used to contest what the author(s) had written and also to freely express thoughts spawned by the ideas in the text.

Reader interventions in printed books were mostly static and closed to outside intervention, consisting mostly of back cover blurbs, teasers on the inside flaps, and quotes from reviewers in the front pages. They were marked by a discourse dominated by the editor or author who further intervened in the book’s paratexts by using attention-getting styles, fonts, letter sizes, and so on.

Nonetheless, the hierarchical layout of a book’s superstructure and a reader’s paratexts no longer depend on the author and editor, but to a large extent they now depend on the reader.

There is still a long road ahead and there remain many obstacles to overcome. One of the main problems to be tackled has to do with the very act of reading, with the stimulus for reading, with creating and fostering what Robert Scarpit many years ago called the willingness to read. A desire to read, generated prior to the act of reading itself, must stir the need for satisfaction by reading a text or other resource. Statistics show that reading has been making inroads all across the planet, but there remain areas where literacy rates are low. Illiteracy, including digital illiteracy, must be curbed everywhere it lurks. Digital literacy programs are needed now more than ever for they can make readers aware of the full range of potentialities of electronic devices, make e-reader and Tablet PC use more widespread, and instill a willingness or desire to read amongst a broader section of the population.

Kerckhove (2010) stated that, over the course of human cultural evolution, 1700 generations lived on this planet without written language, 300 generations had writing in one form or another, and 35 have gone by since the invention of the printing press, but only three generations have lived with electronics, two with computers and one (the current generation) with globally interconnected computers. We are still on the threshold of an evolution in writing and communication, and in reading as well. The way digital reading will develop remains unknown beyond a few identifiable tendencies. Electronic reading and social reading are definitely tendencies that are here to stay, as they are burning the bridges that had connected them to print-based reading. In 2005, Goldsmith stated that digital reading needed to conquer the space of connected virtuality if it wanted to gather a wide intellectual, cognitive and social following, an idea which is currently being played out. Ortega y Gasset (1967) stated that what differentiated humans from other species was our capacity for self-reflection and intimacy; however, the development of connected virtuality will take place along different lines, along the lines of personal extimacy and intellectual sociability. This is the step to be taken from Cogito ergo sum towards Annoto ergo sum, which happens to be the slogan of the 2013 Annotate-sponsored encounter (Figure 8.1).

Reading is launching into an uncharted territory which is full of possibilities yet not without its limitations, a territory in which the formulas proposed for moving forward are mostly prospective and exploratory, subject to the ups and downs of a disruptive system in which the Syndrome of Saturn looms overhead in every project. But reading is also launching into this new age convinced that the staying power and durability of new technology will lead the way to continued development. As Taleb (2012) has asserted, technology and information behave exactly the opposite of how living organisms behave: they grow stronger as they age. The longer a technology or information-based device or practice remains alive, the higher the chances of long-term survivial. This is the so-called ‘Lindy effect’, which according to Taleb’s definition means: ‘For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For the nonperishable like technology, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy.’ Although this principle cannot be extrapolated to all technological developments, in the case of social reading it is certainly applicable because we are convinced that the consolidation of this practice depends on the continuity of emerging technological and business models and on the persistence of the strategies and practices associated with them.