What Readers Do: Aesthetic and Moral Practices of a Post-Digital Age [Hardcover]

Shining a spotlight on everyday readers of the 21st century, Beth Driscoll explores how contemporary readers of Anglophone fiction interact with the book industry, digital environments, and each other.
We live in an era when book clubs, bibliomemoirs, Bookstagram and BookTok are as valuable to some readers as solitary reading moments. The product of nearly two decades of qualitative research into readers and reading culture,What Readers Doexamines reading through three dimensions - aesthetic conduct, moral conduct, and self-care  to show how readers intertwine private and social behaviors, and both reinforce and oppose the structures of capitalism. Analyzing reading as a post-digital practice that is a synthesis of both print and digital modes and on- and offline behaviors, Driscoll presents a methodology for studying readers that connects book history, literary studies, sociology, and actor-network theory. Arguing for the vitality, agency, and creativity of readers, this book sheds light on how we read now - and on how much more readers do than just read.

An exploration of the 21st-century 'everyday' Anglophone reader and their private and social behaviors in a digital world, this book examines how readers engage with each other and the consumer publishing industry.Beth Driscollis Associate Professor of Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her publications to date have engaged closely with contemporary book culture, includingThe New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century(2014) and over 20 book chapters and journal articles in venues includingPost45,Textual Practice, Qualitative InquiryandAngelaki. She has worked on multiple collaborative research projects, the outcomes of which includeThe Frankfurt Book Fair and Bestseller Business(with Claire Squires, 2020),Genre Worlds: Popular Fiction and Twenty-First Century Book Culture