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

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 Do examines 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.

Beth Driscoll is Associate Professor of Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her publications to date have engaged closely with contemporary book culture, including The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and over 20 book chapters and journal articles in venues including Post45, Textual Practice and Angelaki. Globally networked, she has worked on multiple collaborative research projects, the outcomes of which include two co-authored books: The Frankfurt Book Fair and Bestseller Business (with Claire Squires, 2020), and Genre Worlds: Popular Fiction and Twenty-First Century Book Culture (with Kim Wilkins and Lisa Fletcher, 2022). She has also written about readers specifically in book chapters and articles, such as ＂Readers of Popular Fiction and Emotion＂ (New Direction in Popular Fiction, 2016), ＂Book Blogs as Tastemakers＂ (Particip@tions, 2016) and ＂Faraway so Close: Seeing the Intimacy in Goodreads Reviews＂ (with DeNel Rehberg Sedo, Qualitative Inquiry 2019).