Introduction

The development of the Web 2.0 and its numerous applications have led to an exponential growth in the number of authors and texts which mingle with each other in an ever-expanding, prolific space that is now impossible to fathom. The revolution of electronic texts in the publishing industry is a phenomenon that operates on various levels simultaneously, for it affects the technology of text (re)production, the paper or electronic support systems used for writing, and the reading habits of the end user. We are still at the threshold of a new era, of a transitional period of what in the future will be called ‘digital cradle books’, in a time when raw texts with no author’s editing are being launched into cyberspace, in a time when texts with editorial supervision are outnumbered by unedited texts. Reading habits are also being altered by the appearance of new devices and formats, bringing with them completely new discourses and realities that need to be analysed. One of the most significant changes is in the area of text reception. In the traditional editing/publishing process the author–editor relationship was more or less taken for granted, which led to a very passive attitude on the part of readers, who were mere receptors of the final texts unable to intervene in the form or content. However, reading in a digital environment has flipped this model, displacing much of the prominence once solely reserved for authors and editors to the readers, who can now intervene in the different stages of text production, distribution and reception. What is called social reading, in its full array of complexity, is a step futher along the path towards appropriation of the message which is an inherent part of every communicative process. Reader intervention in the written text and the communicative collaboration and exchange between readers and the different agents in the edition/publication chain are emerging as a new paradigm. This shift is fostered by a new mentality which is more sociable and cooperative, and by new technologies which support it with cutting-edge developments that enable new intellectual and informational competences to emerge.

Reading is constantly changing as a result of the changing socioeconomic and technological context in which it is embedded. The emergence of new forms of communication and new media, such as those mentioned above, is determining a variety of new attitudes and behaviours that need to be analysed so as to diagnose accurately to what extent these habits and reading practices are changing and what these changes mean. One of the most frequently recurring issues that crops up in the professional literature is the increasingly important need to document changes such as those taking place within collaborative reading systems, which are under- and misrepresented in public reading spaces and thus complicate the solution to problems associated with information literacy and exponentially increase the digital divide in growing population centres both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Social reading is starting to make inroads into the production segment of the publishing world, which has begun to implement platform-wide social functionalities in an effort to synergise with readers whose need to act socially is encoded into their reader’s DNA. Reading has always struck up social reaction, in the sense that readers have always wanted to transmit to other readers their impressions, feelings and evaluations of what they read, and this constitutes an implict part of the reading process. Yet while in the analogical universe such transmissions were restricted to very small circles, such as traditional reading clubs, in the digital universe of globalised communication the outreach for such transmissions can be worldwide. This obviously affects the conditions in which digital readers set about reading books, but it also affects the conditions in which publishing houses offer digital books to readers. In this new social reading paradigm, visibility of texts for sale and easy searchability become extraordinarily important, given the capacity of readers to penetrate general and specialised social networks and recommend the titles they liked or criticise the ones they did not.

Publishers respond to a societal demand for the production and dissemination of symbolic goods, and also to the basic demand for constant renovation in the products they offer. The drive for innovation and constant change leads to the production of prototypes that compete against one another and in order to perpetuate the system there is a constant need for new input of ideas, text types, book formats and so on. Indeed, there are volumes published which are not commercially viable in the strictest sense, but they are published in order to create, develop and maintain a well-balanced catalogue. Many titles are published in order to further industry-wide innovation and to anticipate emerging readers’ tastes. Such innovative titles are high risk, to be sure, but they prove that publishing houses are committed to innovation; such titles are launched based on their esteemed cultural value rather than their estimated commercial value, and their reception in the market-place is highly unpredictable.

Despite the unpredictability of the market, consumer behaviour is subject to a set of variables which are impossible to assess before embarking on a marketing study and campaign, and many of these variables escape the detection, calculation and planning that publishing houses do prior to a launch. On the other hand, the element of surprise is possible, and even common; often something that had not been expected to do well meets with success and these results are figured into future calculations which try to replicate the experience.

The survival of the fittest in the book industry, an industry that measures success in terms of rapid sales, does not imply that the books sold are good or bad. Such value judgements are often indicative of the socialisation processes behind the success of a book and are often the result of long-term dynamics in which an excellent book may remain dormant for lengthy periods then suddenly take off. The market for literature would be relatively straightforward if it were programmable, but it is not. The natural uncertainty which defines the market makes it desirable to attract readers not strictly by virtue of a book’s literary value but by its social value. Thereby, the capacity for publishers to intervene in social networks, encouraging positive evaluation of the literature they publish, becomes even more important.

The success or failure of a published work depends on a complex set of factors that are difficult to completely isolate and anticipate. Economic factors themselves account for some 90% of all works being removed from sales shelves within a year. Negative criticism, poor distribution, low publicity and adverse consumer habits do away with another large part of all books published. In order to be profitable, book publishers follow increasingly intensive production and distribution models, which leads to fast turnaround times at the booksellers; this often means that many published works stand no chance of reaching their natural readership, if such a thing indeed exists. The number of books published each year is so voluminous that only those which reach minimal levels of visibility will have the opportunity to enjoy any market share at all. Not only does the level of visibility of a work determine whether it will be a success, but easy purchasability of the work will also be of paramount importance.

The major challenge that literature is facing today is how to accommodate new communicative patterns and models of electronic text production and how not to relinquish its commitment to the spread of ideas and the preservation of values such as critical awareness and reflection, which are the basic core of what makes literature significant. According to Holderling, a culture can only remain alive as long as it has the capacity to wonder. In order for the culture of book publishing to remain alive, it must evolve in the direction of collaboration and socialisation. The culture of social networks, consisting of information flows and virtual interconnectedness, are the very expression of the processes that prevail in our cultural and symbolic lives, processes of exchange and interaction between physically disconnected positions that support the cultural and symbolic agents of our society.

This book attempts to address some of the issues implicit in this whole evolutionary process from the individual to the collective. This historical process has seen changes in the conception of the book and the reading processes themselves and has kept pace with societal and technological developments. We are at a convergence when digital and analogue books and discourses are both being used simultaneously, at times antagonistically and at times complementary; this is a time when all aspects of both of these models are being affected by this disruption. Chapter 1 is an in-depth analysis of this phenomenon

The adaptation of reading to different digital environments is not a natural process. In analogical reading, a direct relationship is established between writer and reader, while in digital reading the mediation of technological devices, which requires knowledge of such things as operating systems and content management systems, is less direct. These issues are dealt with in Chapter 2.

The creation, editing and reception processes involved in all manner of works have been fostered by the development of new business models that have allowed greater visibility and improved accessibility. ‘Cloud’ computing applied to book publication and reading is one of the most innovative models for the industrial publishing sector as it allows contents to be de-localized and made available for sale regardless of a reader’s geographic location and technological means. Cloud computing and open access publication are both good examples of how to promote reading and social sharing within user adaptable environments. Chapters 3 and 4 will deal with each of these new models.

Recent changes have led to the emergence of a more social and collaborative mileu in which book sales and distribution platforms are increasingly prominent but in which the development of independent software programs is equally important. Social networks for readers, on the one hand, and social reading websites associated with companies and large publishing enterprises, on the other, will be the subject of Chapter 5. Independent social reading programmes will also be analysed and evaluated.

All of these social reading processes help make content reader-friendly and personalisable to one degree or another. Personalisation implies the capacity not only to change the format of a text (fonts, letter size, space between lines, margins and typed area, brightness, colour and so on) but also the ability to organise contents and create complementary documents containing the different reader interventions. This kind of personalisation, an act of reading that analogue texts did not support, can lead to the reading process extending well beyond the innate standardised processes of analogue reading. Chapter 6 consists of an analysis of all these phenomena.

The use of tags in the digital reading environment also serves to make reading a communal and dynamic social activity, as they play an essential role in the process of disemination and promotion of books. Tags, or labels, give books greater visibility and therefore a greater capacity to reach wider audiences. The existence of tags guarantees that potential readers will be able to search for them, and that metadata about these titles is available for social reading networks, search engines and databases of all kinds. Thus, both an author’s and a publisher’s visibility will often depend on the quality and variety of tags associated with each work and on the ability of readers to assign tags which are significant for them and potentially for other readers. Texts with social labelling become semanticised and the terms used to describe texts acquire a supplementary value that transcends their core meanings. Chapter 7 will provide an analysis of different social labelling systems and of several significant examples, both from within non-professional and academic spheres.

As McLuhan stated in the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’, it is simpler to say that if new technologies extend one or more of our senses beyond ourselves as individuals and into the realm of the social, then there will be a proportional restructuring of all the senses within the culture that such technologies affect. In becoming more social and participative, reading becomes a broader experience. The increased exchange of opinions that social reading fosters makes us more critical and more responsible as readers, as writers and even as citizens. With the book you are about to read, we seek to open up a space for reflection on what the new paradigm of social reading means going forward.