The AAPI- and woman-owned Cupid’s Bookshop, an independent bookstore located in the vibrant Manayunk neighborhood of Philadelphia, specializes in the romance genre, and it brims with feminine aesthetics, bookish merchandise, new romance novels—and, of course, passionate readers. When I tell people about Cupid’s—either fellow literary scholars or amateur book lovers—I get two responses: absolute astonishment mixed with confusion and dismissal; or, a loving, knowing nod and smile followed by a waterfall of questions about their shelving, displays, and events.
Astonishment at the success of such genre bookstores often comes from literary scholars, high-brow amateur readers, and other participants in the upper echelons of culture: people who seek out prize-wining, aesthetically sophisticated, gate-kept literature to consume in their leisure, but perhaps not for their leisure. Readers, in other words, who think of the latest Sally Rooney as their pleasure reading, and the most romantic kind of story they’re interested in. By contrast, the second response comes from garden variety joyful readers—often women—whose taste leans happy and collective rather than serious and consecrated.
Explaining this second group to the first is the great achievement of University of Groningen (Netherlands) professor Federico Pianzola’s new book Digital Social Reading: Sharing Fiction in the Twenty-First Century, especially since it does so without simplifying, romanticizing, or dismissing either group’s sense of what literature is, can be, and should do. As more than just a hope but as an actual research finding, Pianzola suggests that despite fears of very short attention spans and echo chambers, the reading of fiction—broadly and inclusively understood—might actually be experiencing a golden age through social media.
The readers Pianzola is most concerned with are not just feminized fans of romance, but also readers of popular fiction and especially Gen Z. These literatures and reading cultures, as the title Digital Social Reading suggests, are mostly found on the internet. Still, Pianzola does note that brick-and-mortar bookstores tie into his larger argument. A bookstore that one visits in person could feel like a step back, at least, in contrast to the virtually unlimited availability of books on the internet. However, this is not necessarily true, as Pianzola argues:
[in] brick-and-mortar bookshops and libraries, the availability and disposition of books are not planned based on the needs of individual readers—advertising can be targeted at users only in more generic ways [as opposed to algorithmic recommendation culture online]—thus “truly” serendipitous encounters with books are still possible. And the mere fact of visiting such physical places, knowing how to look for information and stories we may like, positions us as active agents within the cultural field. The more we are active explorers of the aisles and shelves of a bookshop or library, the better the chances of finding books that are meaningful for us.
As he does bookstore visits—and the “instagrammability” of romance bookstores in particular seems to further prove his point—Pianzola takes seriously young people’s love of literature, their participation in literary debates, and the online platforms they use for both practices. Instead of harshly judging digital social reading practices, Pianzola takes young readers and their practices online seriously as cultural, cognitive, and collective behaviors that are central to contemporary literature.
There is an urgent need for new, more affirmative ways to participate in culture, especially against the ongoing systematic whiteness of publishing and the exclusivity of elite institutions. As such, it is indeed imperative to focus on readers online as “Digital platforms offer a variety of stories that readers struggle to find in the catalogs of the traditional publishing industry … stories that represent ethnic minorities and queer characters in prominent roles.” In a way, Pianzola echoes a recent trend of contemporary fiction about the limitations of the publishing industry, its ongoing structural racism, the feminization of its underpaid labor force, and so on. This trend has been written about by scholars such as Sarah Brouillette and embodied by novels such as Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl (2021), R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface (2023), and, in its by far most mellow iteration, Emily Henry’s novel, Book Lovers (2022). These novels are situated on the borders of literary fiction, horror, romance, and chick lit. And they sit there for a reason: the wider the reach of genre, the easier to encompass a wide range of emotion, plot, experience, and, perhaps most importantly, audience.
While much of the evidence and argument in Digital Social Reading delivers a surprising jolt of optimism, what stayed with me the most was, simply, the fact of an academic argument about joy and reading. Pianzola is not primarily concerned with short attention spans, rich white women still dominating the landscaped of well-known heroines in popular fiction, or young people’s turn away from long-form narrative. He is aware of such problems, as are the novels I mentioned, and of course does not dismiss them. But, for most of the book, he quite simply finds more interesting things to talk about.
The aspect of the book I found most compelling, personally, is Pianzola’s staunch insistence that as a scholar one can hold a primary interest in “fictional narratives … [and] enjoyment.” This is important, because it is a kind of reading different from scholarly or educational reading. Moreover, it reframes what uses readers put literature to: “it is worth focusing on how affect arises because this is often the end sought by readers, who are not that much interested in literary value.” Importantly, affect does not foreclose value.
Thus, Digital Social Reading serves as a timely defense (and instruction manual for the academic study) of joyfully reading fiction in one’s free time: “more than worrying about saving literature,” Pianzola writes, “I think it is important to grant people the right to be saved by the stories they need.”
Reading has become digital and social. Both of these new phenomena might lead to dismissal on grounds of triviality, groupthink, data-harvesting, and related (and very valid) concerns. But the facts of this contemporary moment of literary culture—which the book names as Digital Social Reading (DSR)—only raises the stakes of Pianzola’s project, because “reading today is a phenomenon related to a variety of media, activities, and places. In such a diverse context, it is crucial to understand how to study reading practices in their increasing complexity.” This is why Pianzola investigates so many different kinds of readers—young people who read fiction, amateur readers who conceptualize genre and other systems of categorization, and devoted fans who write their own stories—to understand our most recent technological and sociological iteration of bookish cultural life.
Thinking about leisure reading, Pianzola provides “comprehension not only of the digital literary sphere but also of the cognitive and aesthetic aspects of reading.” Pianzola compellingly argues that “every reading act is valuable and contributes to the personal growth of the reader, with respect to both literacy and cognitive-emotional skills … judgments of superficiality [of certain reading practices] are often the outcome of a superficial analysis (or a refusal to do any analysis at all).” Pianzola’s own contributions are significant and abundant. Moreover, his extremely valuable literature review across various countries, platforms, and kinds of DSR is a useful tool for researchers and those curious to learn about reading today. Like the internet, furthermore, his research and career are fairly global.
Available as a printed book and as open access on the internet, Digital Social Reading: Sharing Fiction in the Twenty-First Century will shape the field of reader studies and shift our understanding of both the remit and stakes of literary studies. Pianzola offers the transformative axiom that “Studying digital social reading is a way to make literary and reading studies more democratic by focusing on the margins.” He specifies, “Stories help people manage anxiety, fear, and uncertainty, and they help with identity and self-esteem. … social inequality [to paraphrase Safiya Umoja Noble] will not be solved by digital social reading, but there are many silver linings that can have a positive impact on the lives of many young readers.”
Pianzola is among the first scholars who take seriously what people do with books on the internet, about a decade into the regimes of some of the most widely used social media apps and platforms for readers. He thus continues a line of research started by Australian literary scholar Simone Murray and others, but that remains underexplored. This absence is due to methodological challenges that can only be tackled with a multidisciplinary, multilingual, and collaborative approach.
The book, first, offers a major contribution to fields such as reader studies, contemporary literature, and digital humanities because of its methodological agenda and extensive, international, and intersectional literature review. Naming and critically considering a wide range of theoretical and empirical work, the book makes much valuable evidence and information available to researchers who are either new to the field or located squarely in a particular disciplinary or geographical location. Second, Digital Social Reading offers case studies on annotation, marginalia, fan fiction, amateur reviews and taxonomies on platforms such as Archive of Our Own (AO3), Goodreads, and Wattpad. Establishing robust working understandings of digital and social reading, Pianzola acknowledges critiques as far back as Plato’s Phaedrus; still, he defends new technologies as too complex for straightforward dismissal.
Specifically, the focus on young readers as participants in culture (rather than in education or literacy) is a primary contribution of this scholarship. Given their strong generational bias toward digital social activity, Generation Z makes for the required case study, and Pianzola’s analysis of this generation serves as a model of how to do profound research: “As a scholar interested in how stories are meaningful for people and have an impact on their lives, I take this kind of claim [by a young person about Wattpad] as an invitation to challenge the assumptions I have about what reading means. I am eager to know better what kind of stories these young authors are creating, how they are received by their peers, and how these writing and reading dynamics change over time.” Curious and non-judgmental, Pianzola studies the generation that not only most intensely pursues the type of cultural and media activity, but, also, seems to be particularly apt at it.
This sustained focus on young people is only one way of several in which Pianzola thinks about the reception of literature from beyond the center of power and gatekeeping: “DSR spaces (e.g., online book clubs and fandoms) and practices (e.g., beta reading drafts by amateur writers and writing book reviews) are often created as a way to participate in cultural discussions otherwise dominated by a small group of readers, namely individuals belonging to the publishing and media industries and to educational institutions.”
Insightful, critical, and at a small generational remove from his teenage and young adult subjects, Pianzola carefully balances analysis and questions with earnestness. He takes reading cultures online at face value. And this, in turn, enables—we might even say is the foundation of—a profound understanding of their workings, and then a thoughtful, comprehensive, and generative critique.
Thus, Digital Social Reading goes beyond the so-called benefits of reading, in the style of neo-liberal self-improvement. Instead, Pianzola advocates a profound human insistence on the need for stories, because they help us make sense of ourselves and one another, and further support the building of community because “when they find the books they want, readers also like to connect with others who are similar to them or who simply share their same passion.”
This is where the enjoyment of reading becomes deeply meaningful. Making more people passionate readers—with and against educational institutions, which can both amplify and scare away bookishness—is a primary asset of DSR. Now is the time for this kind of inquiry, Pianzola argues, because, “for the first time in history, we have access to the response of millions of readers, an opportunity that can open new ways of understanding how readers choose what books to read and how they engage with them.”
Pianzola offers a historical overview of how books have existed in the world, from before the Gutenberg parenthesis, the time of the printing press as the dominant technology of text, to today’s “hyperparatextuality.” Rather than figuring the compound of digital and/or social as a distraction from a profound reading experience, Pianzola proposes that DSR “contexts add an extra layer of social and media complexity to the complexity of the reading act. That is why a broader range of literacy, social, cognitive, and emotional skills are needed and activated when sharing reading experiences with others.” Perhaps, then, DSR is not just a fun, but, also, particularly sophisticated modality of engaging with and experiencing text.
The fact that social reading goes beyond the individual requires an astute consideration of digital community, because “interactions and bonds between individuals meeting via digital media can occur in different ways.” Pianzola provides an interdisciplinary overview of alternate terms including the particularly suggestive “affinity space” and “ambient affiliation.” These terms are useful because they put “a different emphasis on individual agency, on the reason for which people interact, and on the strength of the ties between them. The widest consensus with respect to DSR seems to be around the concept of ‘affinity,’ which allows us to keep the focus on the book as a mediator of social relationships […] a principle of affinity, rather than geographical, educational, or demographic traits.” As ever, this is not a wholesale endorsement of all bookish interactions online, since “it would be naive to think that passion and a few common interests alone can bring about something as complex as a lively community.”
Fan fiction—in its very concept and structure—offers a turn to the margins that makes diversity possible.
The book turns to annotation and marginalia as places where community emerge. This is an important move, on the level of content as well as method, given that “studying digital social reading is a way to make literary and reading studies more democratic by focusing on the margins, whether that is the material margins of the text or the marginalized individuals who find their voice and audience through online publishing, reading, and discussing.” Focusing on marginalia, Pianzola considers the social reading platform Wattpad and its opportunities for “story co-construction,” through “comments in the margins [that] offer an insight into the process of identity negotiation, reading comprehension, and the emergence/development of emotions and thoughts regarding a story.” This, in turn, leads Pianzola to find a “collective intelligence” in the margins.
Presenting data such as is available on Wattpad users, Pianzola confirms that this site is the place to think about contemporary young adult literature, especially when trying to understand its global dimensions: “Wattpad demonstrates that in the twenty-first century, thanks to digital technology, diversity in readers’ response can be found simultaneously on the same reading platform.” Dispelling the idea that digital reading necessarily does away with the materiality of books, he offers the fun fact, gleamed from a survey, that many Wattpad users buy up to two paperback books per month.
Pianzola offers an example of how one can track affect and aesthetic judgment through Wattpad annotation with the Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice, which is available on Wattpad—and highly popular in part because of a reference in the Harry Styles fan fiction After. He finds that it is “possible to identify patterns related to narrative interest, aesthetic values, and social interaction. When reading teen fiction, social bonding (affective interaction) is prevalent, and when reading classics social-cognitive interaction (collective intelligence) is prevalent.” In other words, Wattpad readers not only read Jane Austen, but they help one another to read her novels well.
Turning to another highly relevant platform, Pianzola thinks about the crucial literary site of fanfiction: AO3. The only non-commercial readership platform under consideration here, AO3 is “an emblematic manifestation of creative and critical reading.”
The gift economy of fan fiction, of course, is famous for male male romance, since the early days of the first Star Trek series and the characters of Kirk and Spock inspiring queer fan fiction. More generally, fan fiction—in its very concept and structure—offers a turn to the margins that makes diversity possible. This is crucial, especially because the representation available in mainstream and commercial publishing is so very narrow. In this, fanfiction can interfere in two primary modes: “one related to the underspecification of a character’s personality and life story, which leave more room for the fans’ imaginary explorations, and one related to the underrepresentation of racial, ethnic, and gender identities in prominent roles in mainstream literature, which leads fans to self-identify with such minor characters and to be willing to tell their stories.” Significantly, Pianzola finds that the sheer abundance of available stories is a big part of what makes fanfic more diverse. Overall, “thanks to their diversity of cultures and topics, Wattpad and fanfiction platforms seem to be places where people can find ‘intimate serendipity, a place where they can express an authentic sense of self without fear or attack, manipulation, or unusual exposure while remaining open to things that will surprise and delight them’ (Reagle 2015).”
While AO3 and Wattpad use tagging in fairly idiosyncratic ways with a focus on identification and trigger warnings as much as literary classification, the shelves on Goodreads are more similar to what literary scholars understand as literary genre: “Genre is the concept around which the majority of DSR practices are organized, and reviews on platforms like Goodreads show how distinctions between genres shape readers’ discussions.”
Thus, literary genre emerges as a point of connection and a site of affect, rather than a signifier of content or aesthetic horizon of expectation. Shelving, then, becomes a marker of what makes a book worth remembering. In terms of genre and reviews, Pianzola comes up against an “apparent unavoidability of the power relations of social distinction described by Pierre Bourdieu (1984) and John Guillory (1993) … amateur book culture still seems to be ruled by the influence of institutional authorities … not necessarily because these authority opinions are regarded as correct but because they are seen as opinions that matter.”
Overall, a different kind of DSR practice emerges on Goodreads: “By using Wattpad, people grow more as readers; by using Goodreads, they develop more in their competence to critically appraise what they read.” Citing Rita Felski’s insight on scholarly mood that “critical detachment, in this light, is not an absence of mood, but one manifestation of it,” Pianzola proposes that Goodreads “has evolved into a very efficient and informative system, with allowances to discuss evaluation and emotional response together with genre-specific conventions.”
Foregrounding the stakes of his analysis, Pianzola reviews concerns such as platform capitalism and impaired cognitive processing as primary concerns—before turning to hope. He reasons that “if reading fiction is a way to build social and emotional skills that are needed when interacting with others or facing intense emotions […], then digital social reading is a way to integrate a practical exercise into reading.”
Pianzola concludes that “digital social reading helps to make books more easily approachable cultural objects for many people, dimming their sometimes formidable auras and introducing them into daily routines and familiar activities, like the use of social media.” Given everything we are up against, what more joyful yet profoundly argued conclusion could a scholar offer? 