Introduction

When we talk of social reading we are addressing the powerful metaphor that envelops the book and continues to have a strong influence on e-culture. In recent years theorists such as Chartier, McKenzie, Stein, etc. have been discussing how the cultural perception of the book as a totalisation unit of production clashes with the heterogeneity that the network implies in which textuality lacks any symbolic meaning. This malfunction operates on a level of the collective unconscious in the acceptance of new forms of text production and reproduction. The debates, discussions, and attitudes that are halfway between what is apocalyptic and what is integrated are in keeping with this logic. In social reading challenges arise from the object of study itself, which is not only limited to the eBook but affects all e-texts with the underlying bibliographical metaphor mentioned above, although technological proposals may take it further and further away from the closed and self-sufficient nature of the traditional book. The characteristics of e-texts must be studied not by means of allocating functions exclusive to digital textuality but rather by the identification of the essentially social characteristics inherent to the system within which they move and are involved. What is novel about this approach is that a system that almost exclusively affected academic publications has now extended its philosophy to the whole of the remainder of the sector. The new scientific paradigm that arose in the Renaissance with the introduction of empirical research processes led to the appearance of a resource, the scientific journal, that served to channel the principles of acceptance, rejection, and refutation inherent to it. The research-publication pairing was established as the condition of a process of the socialisation of results of research that implied their rapid communication, their permanent updating, and their insertion on the social circuit of scientific communities, with the aim of facilitating exchanges of information and the incorporation of new knowledge to the epistemological heritage of the system. The socialisation of knowledge underlays and underlies the articulation of a fully valid model. The metaphor surrounding the book has assimilated this philosophy in a change that has been unprecedented in the history of reading.

This collaborative metaphor has always been present in all kinds of collective manifestations. Reading of excellence is opposed to reading of triviality as is emphasised by Vázquez Montalbán (2007) in one of his last works: ‘Any excellent literary work is an open work that can be interpreted in many ways. The reader is always freer than the author and has centuries to impose his or her view.’ (Our translation.) He thus manifested the leading role of the reader rather than the book, which is also stressed by Antonio Orejudo (2008): ‘Because before the book is read it is outside the reader, and once it has been read it is within; in other words, it has penetrated him or her. Because reading always modifies the reader although the reader never modifies the book.’ (Our translation.) This transformation has been weighed up by all those who at one time or another have become involved in this intensive form of knowing and perceiving that reading represents. This intervention is not only that of the work on the reader but of the reader on the work as a collaborator in the drawing up of sense. Borges used to say that all reading involves a collaboration and a complicity and this is true. For Manguel (1996) the meaning of a text expands in accordance with the reader’s capacity and wishes. Faced with a text, the reader may transform the words in a message that clarifies for him or her a matter that has no historical relation either with the text or with its author. ‘This transmigration of the meaning may enrich or impoverish the text itself; it is inevitable that the circumstances of the reader will play a part. By means of ignorance, faith, intelligence, tricks, and astuteness, and also by means of inspiration, the reader rewrites the text using the same words as the original but under another heading, recreating it so to speak in the very act of creating it.’ It is the reader who in time and in accordance with the changes of his or her personal and social context attributes new meanings to works which as a result of their fixed textual nature remain static as objects. As is only natural, the changes in function of certain literary works are in keeping with the new visions of the world that appear in society in the reading environment. In this environment, when this is necessary or when a lack is felt, new readings, new understandings, and new identifications arise. It must however be taken into account that these changes in function are followed by this new reading that is mediated by the needs (owing to the urge to balance itself of the new reading environment and not of the work itself) of the already encoded message that continues to be apparently identical through time and space like a sphinx. Readings generate meanings by means of all the orders inscribed in them, not only conceptual but also formal. As Mackenzie points out (1999), ‘New readers contribute towards the elaboration of new texts, and their new meanings depend on their new forms.’ This gives them the extraordinary power of deciding to praise or condemn a text, especially when reading is no longer a vocation but becomes a profession, when the ideal reader becomes a professional reader. One of the most emblematic French publishers of the twentieth century, Gallimard, pointed this out:

Reading has changed radically with the appearance of new information technologies; this change involves greater socialisation and shared management. However, these changes are closely linked to the transformation of the book in recent years, in which we have seen the advent of a new type of paradigm that is also linked to the changes in their forms of production, reproduction, and consumption.

From the point of view of reading and writing systems the second decade of the twenty-first century will therefore be remembered as a time of Mutation, Transit, or Crisis in the etymological sense of the word. It derives from the Greek , which can be translated as ‘transformation’ but also as ‘judgement’, as an abstract noun deriving from the verb krín ‘to judge’, ‘to decide’. As can be seen by comparing languages from the Indo-European group (e.g. Latin cernere, ‘to separate’ and hence ‘to discern’), the original meaning of the verb was ‘to separate’, ‘to distinguish’. Transformation therefore, but also separation and judgement regarding the previous systems. The changes affect not only reading procedures, but also social exchanges, our relationship with our surroundings, and all practices relating to language.

It should not be forgotten that we live in a linguistic universe in which things are language and language is the vehicle for naming and knowing things. We do not experience reality in isolation, but reality as it has been constructed, shaped, selected, and categorised by a language, i.e. by a culture (Lamo de Espinosa, 2010). What distinguishes human society from others is not violence, or the division of work, or communication, but the possibility of creating, accumulating, and transmitting knowledge, in other words culture. Rather than a being that can know, man is a being that must know, as he is a being that is biologically unfinished and incomplete. Culture in man is like a second nature, a set of knowledge that allows a society to deal with a specific environment. On the other hand, if in analogical societies the modification of the cultural apparatus to adapt it to a new environment took years and was a process based on at least three generations (that introducing the innovation as a minority; that spreading the innovation and accepting it as a majority; and finally that consecrating the old and now traditional and routine innovation making it obligatory for all, according to Lamo de Espinosa, 1996, p. 29), changes now occur and are assimilated in an accelerated manner and moreover on a global scale. Globalisation and identity are the two centres of socialisation, which are accessed by the formula of networks and individuals (Castells, 1996). Modern man is precisely characterised by this inclination towards change, which has been manifest since the seventeenth century with his continuous habit of criticising and revising all established assumptions of the cultural order.

The need to incorporate functional replacements to the practices developed by conventional culture forces the systematic investigation of the social environment, of the need to adapt to innovations day by day, and a permanent connection to the network, which has become the natural vehicle for exchanges.

This has considerably increased the store of necessary knowledge, not merely to know but simply to be able to operate with social efficiency. It is not sufficient to know the language and the culture; it is necessary to acquire a high level of information and knowledge of social or technical systems, which is done by means of an extended period of education, initially formal and then informal through social networks and exchange systems. Teaching has become mere training, the accelerated learning of the reality of the world, which can continuously be revised in its contents and is unpredictable in its assertions. It is not surprising that Cory Doctorow (2005), in the prologue to his prizewinning novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, maintains that it is most unimaginative to conjecture that there will be reading devices that will simulate the experience of a book on paper in the future. He goes on to admit that ‘the business and social practice of eBooks will be far stranger than that (…). Indeed I believe that it will probably be too strange for us to be able to imagine it nowadays.’

This is a time of change and transformation that takes us back to the early days of the printing press, when a new world begins to emerge and the previous one starts to fade, although it is reluctant to disappear. We are directly experiencing a revolution that in contrast to that of the printing press includes within itself dozens of revolutions that succeed each other almost daily, microevolutions of a technical nature that change at the same time as reading and writing systems, perception, and related practices. We live installed within a process of permanent mutations in which it is difficult to look far into the future, but in which more and more consistent trends emerge that become consolidated as factors inherent to it. One of these trends is that of the socialisation of reading, with a series of technological, institutional, academic, and professional proposals that encourage collaboration and exchange. Reading becomes more and more social, although this has always been a characteristic. A glance through any history of reading suffices to confirm this assertion (Cavallo and Chartier, 2003; Manguel, 1996). In 2012 the National Heritage Council of Cuba awarded a prize precisely to one of the emblematic institutions of this type of reading, the Cigar Factory Reader, which aspires to its inclusion by UNESCO on its list of World Intangible Heritage elements. All cigar factories contain a daïs and a chair reserved for the reader, who reads the daily press and very varied literature to the workers every day. Reading in the cigar factories was introduced in Havana in 1865 at the El Fígaro factory. A hundred and fifty years later, together with militant articles of the Granma and Juventud Rebelde newspapers, in the Cuban cigar factories the same books are still being read, such as Scarlet and Black and the adventure stories of Alexandre Dumas. From hearing the adventures of Edmond Dantès so often, the tobacco merchants created the most famous brand of Havana cigars in the world, Montecristo. This is but one example of how the DNA of reading has always included the need for its socialising. But while up to now this need has required a physical presence and has been subject to the slow but sure word of mouth system, nowadays technological development has made global participation possible.

The development of any consideration on social reading presupposes that the latter is governed by a conception of the same and that likewise it is inseparable from a certain conception of writing. If writing should be understood as a simple process of the direct assimilation of what is transmitted by something printed or digital, we would encounter significant obstacles in an explanatory diagram of the same. It should not be forgotten that reading is an activity of the transformation of the text, with the ways of doing it varying according to the resources of the reader. On the other hand, reducing the text being read automatically to a single medium or a single interpretation is being unaware of all the implicit components of this action, considering the existence of legitimate reading compared with other marginal forms.

Some authors such as Peroni (2004), orientated by a sociology of reading more interested in the act of reading than in the use of the book, call for the notion of reading practices that they consider extendable to other perspectives of the same discipline, which has little to do with practices of print. Peroni proposes passing from the book to the act of reading (du livre au lire) and analysing this operation in its own specificities, understanding reading as an appropriation and a reorganisation in which the reader not only assimilates but also reproduces reading as a social construction of reality, a definition that approaches the notion of the consumer suggested by Certeau (Freijomil, 2009). This is a perspective that is essentially concerned with measuring the efficiency of imposing a practice of the legitimacy of cultural productions, understanding that this legitimacy tends to be identified by professional readers as reading of the book. In relation to these considerations it is true that the book is the only mode to be considered regarding social reading habits, although this may occur in other instances, such as wikis, blogs, general social networks such as Facebook, etc. (Jahjah, 2011).

As Pouliot (2011a) points out, debates on the new resources from a philological, philosophical, technological, and cultural perspective essentially concentrate on the analysis of how reader and writer functions are modified in the fragmented, multi-linear, and simultaneous spaces of written texts. Such discussions frequently suggest that a commitment with texts on the Internet requires more active participation from the reader. Some of these debates conclude that technology is destined to improve the experience of literary reading by means of the increased participation of the receiver (Stallman, 2012). The reader has always been present in the reconstruction of texts and their socialisation. The theorists of Reception Aesthetics with Iser and Jauss reflected on the importance of the reader in the communication process as an inherent and unavoidable part of the same (Iser, 1980; Jauss, 1982, 2008). Roland Barthes revealed the ‘death of the author’ as the unique and absolute creator of ‘his/her’ work (Barthes, 1984), and Umberto Eco suggested that the text was in reality an ‘open work’, unfinished and condemned to be eternally refashioned by future readers (Eco, 1990). It had been proposed as early as the 1960s that the printed book also represented ‘interactive’ and ‘hypertextual’ technology. This is particularly true if we consider that the ‘interactivity’ of the traditional book allows the reader to access the text from multiple levels of the interpretation and correlation of ideas, apart from the fact that the ‘medium’ is suitable for it to be read in fragments. Non linear reading routes are established in which notes, traces, and marks can be introduced, which as in digital hyperlinks lead the reader’s interest towards other territories and moments of narration, such as the footnote. Readers go beyond mere narrative reconstruction in a predetermined order: they must develop the construction and reconstruction of the sequences to determine and make good the deficiencies lost in meaning. According to Landow the result is ‘an active and even intrusive reader’ who generates senses because the hypertext has altered the power of the writer in the determination of the same to encourage the participation of the reader. This scenario leads Landow (2006) and others (e.g. Rosenberg, 1994) to coin a new term for intervention in e-texts: ‘Wreading’.

This neologism naturally recalls previous metaphors by promoting the idea of reading as an act of writing. The ‘Internet Revolution’ of 1994 marked the exponential growth of scientific production with regard to reading (and writing) on-line, and also the observation of the development of ‘multimedia reading’ and the so-called ‘new literacies’. According to Gunther Kress, one of the major exponents of the so-called new media literacy, what now makes the new forms of reading a genuine phenomenon has to do with the simultaneity of the practices and spaces in which readers interact with the texts. ‘The present, however, is marked by a new revolution; a revolution in the meanings, effects, and uses of time and space or information of all kinds, the ruling sense of time now is that of the speed of light; the relevant unit of space that of the globe’ (Kress, 2007: 21).

There is, however, a lively theoretical debate as to whether it is correct to call the new practices ‘multimedia reading’ or in any case to use terms such as metamedia reading, on-line reading, or interactive reading, by all accounts descriptive terms attaching more importance to the medium than explaining how the new reading process works. By the same token, recourse has also been had to concepts such as transliteracy, multimedia literacy, and informational literacy, as they define the phenomenon in an operational manner, alluding to the behaviour of readers and the developing of new skills (see Mosenthal and Kamil, 1990). One of the most frequently quoted definitions is that of Aufderheide (1997) in which he conceptualises media literacy as ‘[the ability to] decode, evaluate, analyze and produce both print and electronic media’ (Aufderheide, 1997: 79). It is now recognised that the ‘reader’ not only reads anonymously but participates in content and leaves a visible trace of ‘his or her passage’ through the text. For Aufderheide one of the key points of how the new phenomenon operates is precisely this: the reader’s potential as an active critic and creator of contents (blogs, collaborative writing, the production of audiovisual microcontents), or even as a remaker of stories created by third parties, as occurs in the sociological and aesthetic phenomenon of fan fiction (Pouliot, 2011a). Marc Jahjah of SoBook Online maintains that reading is eminently social and that the expression is therefore a pleonasm. The author considers that calling these experiences social reading is a rather abusive assimilation that looks back to an older image of the reader. According to Jahjah our reading is completely social even without the intervention of social networks.

In any event the active or passive participation of readers in the use of new technologies assumes a profound re-adaptation process on our part. Participation in and the development of a set of actions triggered off by any kind of intervention gives us a new scenario from the point of view of publishing, reading, and ways of communication (Shirky, 2012). Some authors even go as far as to talk of a process of anthropological mutation. This has led to a flood of empirical studies on the repercussions or effects of technology in the fields of pedagogy and cognitive psychology. Several prestigious neurologists such as Maryanne Wolf (2009) and Gary Small (2009), among others, have proved that the human brain is subject to a considerable impact owing to the daily aggression generated by the use of new technologies. According to these experts our brain is not yet prepared to withstand the constant rhythm and the intensity of stimuli of the constant consumption of all kinds of cultural contents on the various types of screens. The new generations feel very much at home with 2.0 tools, but the majority are unaware of the business, ideological, and social issues behind each of these tools.

The new perception of the notion of reading derives from a cultural environment in which a dialogue occurs between writer and reader, a quality that is magnified on the Internet where both can interact in real time to generate a new paradigm of creation and reception. The phenomenon of sharing an artistic objective with a community of players who act on the work and recreate it according to their own contributions is linked to the concept of post-production which includes all spheres of art (Corral Cañas, 2012). According to this theory (Bourriaud, 2009) the cultural atmosphere is so overloaded that the artist does not consider innovation ex nihilo but rather the reformulation of itineraries on the manifestations of the past, with the consequent contamination of times and cultures in a kind of collage or remix. Bourriaud considers that we can talk of ‘semionauts that in the first instance produce original routes between the signs’ (2009, 14). Parallelism in the literary field is made visible in various types of writing in which the author shares his or her texts and accepts suggestions in the form of comments from friends or anonymous commentators in keeping with this artistic tendency. The author can talk of forms of writing and complex authorship and of forms of continuous creation in which various links of the message production line come together. This hypervisibility of the author (Imbert, 2008) is apparent in that his or her scope of action is the Internet, and thus generates intervention mechanisms inherent to it. As Guillaud (2012) points out:

Compared with the model described by Bourdieu (1996) to characterise the logic of the literary field, we are faced with another in which an author–reader or reader–reader relationship is imposed without the necessary intervention of the remainder of the elements of the publishing chain and especially of the publisher. This is an incessant recomposition linked to the ‘permanent reorganisation of the process of writing and publication, of a recasting of the relationship with readers … . It is a case of modifying frontiers and categories, of extending the limits by the invention of new forms.’ This reconfiguration displaces certain practices:

Soccavo emphasises the condition of books as symbolons in the etymological sense of the word in its function of the restoration of two parts that may be separated in distance and in time in the necessary complementarity between author and reader (Soccavo, 2012a).

The new free web applications greatly simplify cooperation between peers and follow the principle of not requiring advanced technological literacy. These recent mass technologies stimulate the experimentation, generation, and transfer of both individual and collective knowledge. Social reading corresponds to the 2.0 learning models, i.e. learning by doing, learning by interaction, learning by searching, and learning by sharing.

Publishers are becoming more and more aware of the importance of social networks in the development of their activities, not only with the aim of promoting and projecting authors and works but also as a business model. The Hachette Group, for example, launched ChapterShare in 2012; this is an application that allows the viewing in advance of first chapters of books, sharing them with friends, and if they are interested they purchase. However, the influence of social networks goes beyond that of complementing publishing activities. Indeed many companies now develop contents that cannot conceivably be understood or followed up without the help of Facebook or Twitter. For example FrankBooks (http://www.frankbooks.de/?lang=en) use the Application Programming Interface (API) of Facebook to ‘socialise’ by configuring a content that involves readers, authors, characters, etc. thanks to the possibility of interacting with the works through Facebook. As one reads, the work’s windows open parallel to the text with readers’ comments, with photographs of the places mentioned, etc. With FrankBooks the author is thus able to present his story in a totally unique, colourful way that creates another thrilling level of storytelling. Using the integrated Facebook connection, the author can establish new characters or different points of view commenting on his actual story. Readers can also interact with the author, a character in the story or other users via this on-line connection. It is like having a global book club inside each FrankBook, accessible 24/7. In addition, a character from a FrankBook story can start an independent life on Facebook, leaving the original story behind and entering his or her own virtual reality. Readers are free to follow and interact with the character for as long as they want.

This is similar to what happens with Book Pulse (http://www.bookpulse.com/website/index.html), where authors can post book-related components such as trivia games or the book description and excerpt on their timeline, encouraging readers to play, as well as buy the book and share the widget with their friends. Using the widget, a book could virally travel the Facebook sphere, adding more potential readers.

Kno, the company specialising in software for educational digital contents, has created a reading application for Facebook. Its website (see Figure 5.1) on this social network now has available 200 000 digital textbooks in this new application based on reading in the cloud and on HTML5 language. Students can access the books directly from Facebook without the need for having an iPad. As on the Internet or on an Apple medium, the application allows them to comment, make annotations, and keep in touch with their contacts. They can also form interactive study groups and even take parts of the text to their news channels or update on their wall.

Another interesting example in the press sector is the initiative of the Wall Street Journal in launching an application on Facebook, WSJ Social, which allows readers to consult the news without having to leave the social network. The application allows the personalisation of the contents. ‘À la carte’ service is offered as the members of the social network can choose the news they are interested in and view the news that interests their friends. The news they vote on or share will be referenced in their profile. The newspaper maintains some free access news and others are blocked unless a subscription is paid. The newspaper includes this novelty as part of its business policy of placing the publication ‘everywhere’.

Facebook has likewise generated systems for integrating networks specialising in social reading with the platform itself in such a way that readers can incorporate their libraries, comments, wishes, assessments, etc. within the general framework of the website. This is the case of Babelio or Anobii, for instance, where accounts with the respective profiles can be connected to achieve full interaction between them.

Browsers such as Chrome or Firefox host applications that allow the sharing of reading and comments on Facebook. An example is Readum (http://www.readum.com/) which was created by the ReadSocial company and allows the sharing of notes and comments on the books digitalised by Google through the browser (Firefox or Chrome) on Facebook, configuring a social reading system in the cloud.

A rather extreme but significant example is what has been called twitterature, a curious experiment that has dared to give an approach never seen before to works that no longer appeared to offer new interpretations. The best known example of this twitterature is the adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in which each member of the team had his or her own Twitter account. So @Juliet twittered from her balcony seeking her @Romeo, while @Montagues and @Capulets exchanged all kinds of phrases. There are many examples of Twitter being used for literary purposes. Philip Kerr, the winner of the RBA international prize for crime writing in 2009 for If the Dead Rise Not, decided to disseminate a thriller via Twitter so as to generate expectation before the awarding of the prize by RBA Books.

The prize-winning ceremony reflected the setting of the novel and was held on 9 September 2010 at the Hotel Juan Carlos I in Barcelona. As from 30 August and until the day of the ceremony, the tale told by Kerr was disseminated in small doses through the Twitter account @ Pinn_RBA.

Ludovic Hirtzmann defines this genre as ‘the literary universe of instantaneousness and the world of the short message’ (Gamero, 2012). A universe to which it is not easy to give a starting point. No doubt someone at some time, encouraged by the example of novels on blogs, decided to give Twitter a use other than its original one. Not only as a social network but also as a laboratory of literary and sociological experimentation. An example of the growing importance of the phenomenon is the creation in 2009 by Jean-Yves Fréchette and Jean-Michel Le Blanc of the Institut de Twitterature Comparée (http://www.twittexte.com/ScriptorAdmin/scripto.asp?resultat=734326), that compiles information on the work of different twitterators together with a great variety of activities, materials, and resources.

Twitter is becoming more and more important as a meeting point for authors and readers, giving them new opportunities for contacting. An example of this is that of the activities carried out by the Fundación Sánchez Ruipérez in Spain for the encouragement and promotion of reading. ‘Readers in the cloud’ is the name given to the eBook and Biblioteca project, which includes the revitalisation of a novel through three groups of 15 people. Each one of these groups read ‘Niños feroces’ [Ferocious Children] by the highly acclaimed Spanish author Lorenzo Silva in a different way: some on an electronic reading device, others on an iPad, and yet others on an iPad with enriched reading, i.e. finding links in the text that expand the information included in it. For its development it has the mediation of the Biblioteca through Twitter in which a large number of messages were exchanged with the author (a great supporter of this medium) and the blog http://unlugarenlanube.fundaciongsr.com/blog.php

The aim of the whole of this project and others of this institution is to find answers to the questions that have been raised by the introduction of technology regarding the traditional ways of accessing reading. Within the framework of this project, which was developed in 2011 and 2012, the author and the participants held two meets on Twitter with the hashtag #niñosferoces. The first meet was held on 25 October 2011 when the readers chatted with Silva about aspects of his life, his work, and his writing. The complete conversation is included in the Hoy Lorenzo Silva [Today Lorenzo Silva] post on the blog Un lugar en la nube [A place in the cloud] (http://unlugarenlanube.fundaciongsr.com/story.php?id=146). The second meet took place on 14 November 2011 (http://unlugarenlanube.fundaciongsr.com/uploads/contenidos/doc/149-1-Segundaquedadaferoz.pdf)

Enrichment and recommendation tools that are revitalising publishing tasks and which give works visibility are now appearing on the Internet. An example is BookRX (http://books.knightlabprojects.com/), a web app that provides recommendations of books according to the tweets of a private account and the subscriptions that are maintained to other social networks. It suffices to enter a Twitter address for the program to develop a profile and for a list of works to appear according to the same. The recommendations are divided into various categories: Business, Politics & Social Sciences, Science & Technology, Fiction, Sports & Fitness, and Science Fiction & Fantasy. This project was developed by the Knight Lab of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University in Illinois. Initially the app analyses the user’s tweets by comparing them with the terms linked to the various book categories. The program subsequently searches inside the categories to find the works it is going to recommend, always in relation to the terms used in the tweets.

Social reading: a network phenomenon

We understand ‘social reading’ to mean reading carried out on virtual environments where the book and the reading favour the formation of a ‘community’ and a means of exchange. In general the meeting point takes the form of an Internet platform or specific software product that organises and provides users with a space for exchanging information and for horizontal communication where works are assessed, as well as for sharing opinions on a text, participating in discussion groups, and/or preparing written comments and annotations on the works and their authors (Pouliot, 2011b). Henrik Berggren, the CEO and founder of the German company Readmill, said that he preferred the phrase ‘shared reading’ to ‘social reading’, and argued against transforming books from solo experiences to social ones (Walters, 2012).

Bob Stein, the founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book and aware of this new form of approaching reading, coined the term ‘Social Book’ to refer to a kind of work that facilitates the exchanging of information, collaboration between readers, the incorporation of novelties, annotation, and integration on networks of all kinds. For Stein, Social means having a conversation with someone you know in the margin of the book. When we read socially we mark the page on various levels, such as graphic marks, notes, and comments. Social also means having access to the comments of all those who are reading in the system, and also the possibility of becoming involved with the authors asynchronously or in real time ‘in the book’.

Stein (2010) proposes a taxonomy of social reading (Table 5.1) that he considers necessary in order to make sense of this wide range of practices. This ‘landscape’, as this author calls it, ranges from face-to-face discussion to the overwhelming diversity of sites and social tools that can be used for social reading, although Stein limits his proposal to books and documents in text form.

The new generation of readers is accustomed to text messages, to chatting, and to loading and downloading videos on You Tube (Thomas, 2012). To these readers the term ‘on-line’ sounds strange as it is their natural environment. Reading does not end with the book but continues through discussion groups, websites, or parallel creations such as fan fiction. They create new characters, new endings, new developments, and even advance translations of works to provide alternative editions to the official ones. The internationalisation of consumption and the generalisation of demand has promoted phenomena such as that of fan translation, groups of readers linked to an author, a work, or a saga who get in ahead of the official translation into their language and propose an alternative version, which in most cases is produced with insufficient linguistic knowledge. Normally these versions no longer circulate once the legitimate version is released. These translations are generated in all genres and acquire particular importance in those relating to consumption by young people, such as Mangas, Anime, and even video games. Scalation is the name that has been given to a translation of Manga carried out by aficionados; it comes from combining Scan and Translation and refers to the method used for circulating the work: scanning the original, producing a digital edition of the latter, and producing a version in one’s own language. The groups create a collaborative environment for the development of the shared tasks. In the world of bestsellers even activities that are not in the company’s interest may be inverted to obtain a profit, albeit indirectly. Companies whose titles have been translated by aficionados and offered through the pages of the groups responsible for them or on p2p exchange pages have been tolerated in the knowledge that they constitute a means of promoting the work and their products, and also an important source of information on potential clients and on the works that are most widely disseminated and on marketing possibilities. In this way an illegal activity becomes an accepted form of collaboration behind the scenes.

Statistics show how the gradual incorporation of the new generations to reading increases the percentages of e-reading. In the fourth edition of The Kids & Family Reading Report (Scholastic, 2013), a biennial national report on the reading practices of children aged from 6 to 17, the results show that the percentage of digital readers has almost doubled compared with that of the previous study of 2010. The figure has risen from 25% to 46%. The percentage of children who acknowledge that they would read more if they had more access to eBooks has doubled. On the other hand, most children declared that eBooks were good for sharing reading with friends and collaborating with them. The aspects of the study shown in Table 5.2 stand out.

Socialisation systems are often induced by the platforms themselves, such as Amazon, (with @author: Connecting Readers and Writers) by means of which readers can ask the author questions during the reading of a book. Random House also launched Author Portal in March 2012 with the aim of providing its authors with information on the operation of their works and contact with their readers.

Along these lines Democrasoft and Vook announced in 2012 that WeJIT was now available through the VookMaker Vook program. Founded in 2009, Vook has created an innovative technological platform that allows anyone to create large eBooks, add videos, audio, and images, and publish eBooks on their own website and on the major e-retailers and follow up their sales. Vook works with a range of content members such as NBC, Simon & Schuster, Franklin Covey, and Hay House, and most of the most important distribution channels including Apple, Amazon, Google, and Barnes & Noble. For its part Democrasoft, Inc. is an innovative licence company with a history of pioneering technology. It is the creator of the Collaborize platform and Collaborize Classroom (www.CollaborizeClassroom.com), the prize-winning combined learning platform for K-20 levels. It is also the creator of WeJIT (http://www.mywejit.com), a new self-publication model based on on-line collaboration that extends via several platforms and communities.

WeJITs allows any eBook reader to communicate with the author or other readers directly from the eBook. Vook therefore offers the possibility of combining eBooks with the WeJIT discussion platform based in the cloud. This new service is being offered as a result of the agreement reached by Democrasoft, Vook, and Waterside Productions to integrate WeJit technology in eBooks. For example, one of the bestselling books, that of J. D. Messinger (2012) published by the Waterfront digital publishing house, included 32 discussions embedded in the work.

There is also the case of HarperCollins, which has created the website Bookperk (http://www.bookperk.com/) in which readers can access exclusive contents, special information on their favourite authors, and any kind of privileged information from the publisher. Moreover, they can also enjoy special discounts, invitations to events, autographed copies, etc. With this initiative HarperCollins aims to reach its readers directly. This HarperCollins website has adapted to new needs, which means that it plans not only to achieve more immediate contact with its readers but also to offer them their books and content in a personalised manner.

Authors have seen how communication with the reader is revitalised and strengthened by means of the exchanging of impressions of the work, the plot, and the characters. Scott Westerfeld, the author of works such as Polymorph (1997), Fine Prey (1998), Evolution’s Darling (2000), So Yesterday (2004), the Leviathan trilogy consisting of Leviathan (2009), Behemoth (2010), Goliath (2011), and The Manual of Aeronautics (2012), an illustrated guide to the Leviathan series and the winner of several well-known literary prizes (the Victorian Premier’s Award, Aurealis Award, Peeps and Uglies were both named as Best Books for Young Adults 2006 by the American Library Association, and Leviathan won the 2010 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Fiction), admits that he has recorded over 30 000 e-mails from readers in recent years, thanks to which he has improved his writing process. Companies such as Textnovel. com (http://www.textnovel.com/home.php) develop stories for mobile phones in which thousands of users can receive texts from their favourite authors and exchange opinions with them.

The involvement of readers and authors moves up a gear thanks to the Crowfunding systems, in which readers invest to set in motion a publishing project and obtain a proportional part of the profits when this has been done. The Crowfunding publishing model thus involves the financial participation of the reader in the projects developed by the authors, with the aim of obtaining the necessary funds to develop the work. This is also known as collective financing or micropatronage. This system is not new and has been experimented with by prestigious authors such as Stephen King, who after the success of his novel Riding the Bullet with over 400 000 downloads in a few days when e-publication was in its infancy, published another work ‘The Plant’ exclusively and partially on the Internet. King expected cybernauts to pay one dollar voluntarily for each of the first three chapters. Fewer than half of them chose to pay and the project was a failure. Furthermore, Lorenzo Silva, winner of the prestigious Premio Planeta award, published Los trabajos y los días [The works and the days] in 2012 thanks to contributions from readers.

In many cases financial investment also involves the possibility of taking part in the development of the work, exchanging opinions, comments, and assessments with the author. This is the case of the Sandawe publisher of comics (http://www.sandawe.com/) that was created in November 2009, and which in 2012 was celebrating having reached the figure of 500 000 euros of financing for its works. Its directors speak of ‘edinauts’ insofar as its readers-financiers participate not only in the economic viability of the work but also in its development. The situation is the same at Zola (http://zolabooks.com/), which was conceived as a meeting point between all players of the book chain, as one of its founders Joe Regal explains:

Unbound is another interesting crowdfunding project devoted to the world of books. According to its founder John Mitchinson:

Several well-known writers have begun to use the website for publishing their works, such as Terry Jones and Amy Jenkins. Readers who participate in their financing can suggest ideas to the author, and those contributing over £250 may have a meal with him or her and enjoy full access to his or her websites.

Book-a (http://book-a.net/) is an innovative publishing project that consists of the creation of a library ‘in the cloud’ co-produced on the Internet by means of micropatronage and title by title. Each title is conceived as a seed-project and contains the germ of a publishing proposal to initiate a thematic collection. These collections present initial story lines on which to articulate the cognitive and human capital that will feed book-a while new people and contents join the project.

The first six books request collective support through the book-allow platform. The objective is for them to become books; these books initiate thematic collections that thanks to the collective boost will make up the shelves of the bookatheque, a club-library in the cloud for its cultivators to use and enjoy. One of the most interesting aspects of this project is that of the Book-across section in which users can cross contents in new editions that may be published with criteria of rigour and publishing quality.

Independent publishers and research groups interested in joining the project may request the opening of their own collection and bookshelf, launching publishing projects and publications that explore some of the themes of the headings and which wish to be co-financed as books and as seed-contents for book-a.

Taking as a base the world of books and that of new technologies, book-a offers a collaborative framework within which co-producing agents (authors, readers, publishers, collaborators, benefactors, etc.) can promote, look after, enjoy, discuss, and extend contents relating to architecture, art, photography, the city, history, theory, and criticism. Book-a offers its promoters various rewards including exclusive copies of a printed limited edition of each book or the possibility of sponsoring the sending of books to libraries.

Another interesting company is EdiCool (http://www.edicool.com/), a publishing house in which both author and reader participate in the development of a project and share the profits. The company takes care of the development of the publishing project and of placing it on the market. ‘Unglue.it’ from Gluejar is also an interesting initiative. In this case what the company does is release eBooks thanks to the contributions of individuals and institutions. The contributions received pay for the holders of the rights so that the work can be published under a Creative Commons licence. This formula is particularly interesting for works that are out of stock and out of print. Among these initiatives Bookcamping stands out on the Goteo Crowdfunding platform, a social network of collective financing that encourages all kinds of initiatives for sharing goods and services. Bookcamping is an open collaborative library in which over a thousand titles are available. The publisher Editions du Public.com (www.editionsdupublic.com), suggests that Internet users should invest 11 euros. If the book raises 22 000 euros it is published. If it is not, the money is returned. My Major Company proposes to launch a writer for 10 euros on the website www.mymajorcompanybooks.com.

The Crowdfunding systems are becoming more and more important in all creative areas, above all in that of publishing. According to statistics provided by Kickstarter, one of the websites that best represent Crowdfunding, in 2012 over 5000 publishing projects were presented of which over 1600 obtained the financing they had requested. However, in the field of the graphic novel, for instance, Publishers Weekly has considered Kickstarter to be the second largest publisher in the United States by turnover (Allen, 2012), which gives an idea of the importance of this business model for certain publishing sectors.

All these examples show that after several years citizens have conquered the right to set themselves up as issuers and distributors of information and knowledge. Blogs and other social mediums prepared the way and now many projects that cannot be launched in an analogue medium are defined in a digital one. This is a powerful disintermediation mechanism that eliminates the greatest obstacle that prevented most creative projects from originating and developing: financing. Furthermore, this financing is not merely economic but is also projected in forms of participation and exchange that are mutually enriching for both authors and readers. In contrast to self-publication systems, these formulae allow authors to find out whether their work actually has an audience, to get to know the interests and the profiles of his or her readers, and above all to discover whether they are willing to pay for its content. We thus have a direct dialogue between the writer and the reader, which seemed to have disappeared from the publishing world until now.

Initiatives featuring authors and readers are becoming more and more abundant and illustrate the importance they are acquiring in the publishing chain and the attention they are attracting from publishers and sales platforms. An example of this is one of the original forms of the socialisation of reading, the lending of books between users. In recent years initiatives have been developed to facilitate this between the users of different reading devices. Such is the case with Ebook Fling (http://ebookfling.com/) or BookLending (http://booklending.com/faq.htm). EbookFling.com is a virtual platform for the lending of eBooks in the form of a social network of eBook clients who can lend and borrow eBooks. The system facilitates the direct lending of the books between Kindle and Nook users. Each reader can access thousands of people with whom to share his or her readings apart from with friends or acquaintances. Furthermore, borrowing is free. The borrower can read the book for 14 days on the device that has downloaded it; at the end of this period the book disappears from the device of the lending reader and ‘returns itself’ to the device from which it was borrowed, whether this be a mobile phone, a computer, or an Apple iPad.

The mechanism is simple: the owner of an eBook registers on the page and offers the books that he or she wishes to lend to other readers. When someone borrows one of the eBooks that the user has made available to others, he or she earns credit that will allow him or her to exchange a book of another eBook Fling user. The lender gains credit for each five books lent from his or her list. The system follows the rules for loaning between friends established by Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Book sharing is, however, not the only possibility of these initiatives. Ownshelf (http://ownshelf.com/) proposes a website in the cloud for exchanging eBook libraries with other users. Once users have registered they can upload their collections of eBooks to the cloud and exchange them either totally or partially with the other participants on the network. Friends’ libraries can be viewed, and any book you want to read from any of them can be selected. Once the book has been taken from the library of the lender it is included in that of the borrower.

Social reading platforms: diagnosis and evaluation

Reading becomes social thanks to programs such as Copia (http://www.thecopia.com/home/index.html) which allows the reading of books on all types of screen (PC, mobiles, iPad, Android systems, etc.) and the sharing of notes and recommendations with other readers with similar tastes. It also provides links to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin. Rethink Books (http://rethinkbooks.com/) allows the sharing of reading through its Social Books collection, while Openmargin (http://openmargin.com/) allows the creation of shared book intervention spaces. There are websites for readers’ encounters so they can help authors to develop their publishing proposals such as Book Country, a social network designed by Penguin where readers and writers meet to read the original work of the latter and to write posts or comments on their works. This is marking a trend of creating communities relating to the book before it is published. Another example is Wattpad, which describes itself as ‘a viral community where readers connect with authors and share stories with them’. Babelio, Anobii, Goodreads, LibraryThing, BiblioEteca, Book Glutton, and EntreLectores propose shared sites for exchanging reading experiences and making reading a social phenomenon. The books are graduated according to the needs of the reader and allow the follow-up of the latter’s contributions and those of the author to them (Unbound, http://unbound.co.uk/, Red Lemonade, http://redlemona.de/) or the graduating of their modes of presentation, scope, and format according to market needs (Every Book is a Startup, http://toddsattersten.com/).

Social reading platforms have grown considerably in the last two years in keeping with the evolution of digital reading and the technological possibilities that reading devices offer. They are equipped with programs that with certain nuances allow the reader’s involvement in the personalisation and socialisation of the text. Annotations, underlining, highlighting texts, choosing the print, the letter size, and the line spacing are habitual features in all programs. At the same time the connectivity to Internet of e-ink devices and Tablet offers the possibility of sharing comments and annotations on different social networks that may be general in nature, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tuenti, etc., or specialised such as Readmill, Kobo, Copia, etc.

Social reading platforms offer a very wide range of services. They basically offer the possibility of commenting on any work already existing on its database, bringing together all interventions on the database and allowing the development of labelling and assessments. The ways of presenting the information vary greatly; Anobii can be singled out as it generates a bookshelf with all works that have been read, commented on, desired, or simply imported from other bookshelves by the user.

Off-line reading platforms

The features of all platforms are very similar. The essential difference lies in the nature of the texts commented on and their original format. In most cases the reader comments on a work that he or she has already read, is reading, or wants to read, but without its original being on the platform. The platform provides the resources to air his or her opinions on the work, thus allowing these to be shared with other users, and even the finding of likeminded users according to their reading record. This is the case of BiblioEteca, Anobii, EntreLectores,² Sopa de Libros, LibroFilia, Que Libro Leo, Library Thing, etc.

Here we can also talk of social networks of readers. Users place comments on the work, their quotes, assessments, etc. However, it is not possible to observe on-line the intervention of other readers.

On-line reading platforms

The most interesting platforms are those that offer the possibility of downloading or incorporating a book to them and reader intervention at the same time. Platforms may be very diverse, but they are basically of two types: associated with a website for the distribution and sale of eBooks such as 24 symbols, Kobo, Copia, and Amazon, or independent such as Readmill or Rethink Books. This kind of reading will have a social impact on the structure of the digital book market in the short and medium term and on the global market in the long term.

In the first place this is because the competitive advantage that permits a social interaction service for readers with their environment and with people sharing similar interests will favour the players who offer an added value reading service. Secondly, it is because it will increase the capacity of capturing a significant portion of the digital book market in the first instance and then perhaps that of the book on paper.

Social reading platforms and applications

New systems of recommendation

Conclusion

Social reading has become one of the defining elements of the new digital reading environment. Umberto Eco has said that ‘the limits of interpretation coincide with the rights of the text’. In defending the central importance of the text in this manner, Eco recognises that texts have an autonomous, virtually sovereign character that allows them to weather whatever clashes they may have with their readers. It may be that Eco’s staunch statement in The Limits of Interpetation (1990) was meant to ward off overinterpetations of the proposals he had made previously in The Open Work (1989). Nonetheless, he makes the following rather presumptuous, though undeniable, principle clear: there is no such thing as reading without readers, and when readers read they tend to interpret what they read. And, we would have to add that readers tend to communicate the interpreted meaning of what they read. Kafka maintained that we read in order to ask questions, yet also to find the answers and to share with others the experience of reading. In fact, we can think of the history of reading as comparable to an unstoppable march towards communicative expansion. The invention of the printing press brought about an exponential increase in the number of readers; the appearance of public libraries brought about increased accessibility to books; and the establishment of reading rooms, circles, clubs, and other venues where reading could be shared brought about an increased interest in reading more. Such public forums for reading were an attempt to provide an institutional framework for the social character of reading. We need to take an active part in the reading process, to transmit what we have understood and to discuss it with others. Whether taking part in the process meant jotting notes in the margins of all sorts of books, a practice which began in earnest after the invention of the printing press and which made each book unique and distinguishable from mass-produced others, or public readings and discussions in innumerable political and cultural contexts and contents, social reading has always been implicit in the act of reading itself. In all contexts prior to the digital evolution of reading, we were limited by the format of printed books, by the settings in which reading took place and by the excessively individualistic character of reading, constrained as it was by distance and time. The social reading experience became consistently social only within the contexts of libraries and private book collections.

The true socialisation of reading only occurs when barriers of distance and time are overcome and reading takes place in a global arena, transforming books themselves into meeting places around which ‘shared discussion’, to borrow a term from Stein, can take place. Such a transformation allows readers to confront St. Thomas Aquinas’ notion of quem auctor intendit, by which he meant that the literal sense which the author of a text intended should prevail, with another notion, namely that of quid lector cogitat, in which the reader’s interpretation of a text can prevail. And this new dimension has now developed tremendously thanks to the technological changes afforded by digital publishing. Digitally published texts force us to reconceptualise the books, for they are more open, more interactive, more participatory, and digital publication makes us forge a new concept of libraries, which, like the eBooks they house, need to be more dynamic and energetic. Libraries need to be more actively involved in the process of information exchange and social interaction with users, with the training of personnel capable of meeting this demand and with the development of digital competences among library staff.

We are now well aware that readers can comment on, annotate, tag and discuss the contents of books and book drafts. We are aware that they can read what other readers have commented, what others discuss in their book reviews, which comments about specific books are the most popular, which books are commented on the most, and so on. We know full well that we can analyse the textual and paratextual traceability of a written work. However, simply knowing everything that readers can do with eBooks begs the question: What makes a reader social? How do you become a social reader?

This question is not posed in vain. By knowing the profile of social readers and the way they became social, libraries can be ideally positioned to set up specific programmes which will promote reading and foster readers’ participation in them. Libraries that presume that using social networks alone constitutes reader outreach need a reality check in the form of empirical data, because the act of reading mobilises competences that go well beyond mere exchange of opinions on Facebook or Twitter. What is needed of libraries and their personnel is training in the specific competences of e-reader hardware and software usage so as to guarantee that users will be able to take full advantage of their wide range of features. Social reading is a challenge which information and documentation professionals and the different participants in the e-reading environment should meet by becoming specifically skilled in the upcoming years. The strategic interest of social reading can be seen in Amazon’s 150 million dollar purchase of Goodread in March 2013. All studies show how traditional systems for finding worthwhile books to read, and for mediating the value of reading material, are changing. These studies also show how readers are increasingly swayed by the opinions of other readers when it comes to buying a new book. Social reading networks have become one of the main systems for discriminating between books at a time when both money and time are in short supply. The trend towards direct reader participation is projected to increase and in a short span of time social reading is predicted to emerge as the centre of a complex system in which user-friendly searchability, easy retrievability and global visibility of books will become foremost among editors’ objectives in the new digital reading ecosystem.