Influence of (Perceived) Audience on Book Status

Books, like other artistic works, are defined not only by the intentions (or background) of their creators but also by their audiences.³ Bourdieu finds that ‘there are few fields (other than the field of power itself) in which the antagonism between the occupants of the polar positions is more total’ than for literature, amplifying the impact of association with an ‘intellectual’, ‘bourgeois’, or ‘mass’ audience.⁴ The ‘negative relationship…established between symbolic and economic profit, whereby discredit increases as the audience grows and its specific competence declines, together with the value of the recognition implied in the act of consumption’⁵ [emphasis his] devalues any work appreciated by a mass audience. Damage caused by their appreciation can be, to a degree, counterbalanced by critical approval and simultaneous attention from high-status ‘intellectual’ audiences, but not cancelled out. Within this exceptionally polarised literary field, the novel ranges across a wider territory than drama or poetry, offering a great number of possible locations along axes of size of audience and degree of consecration.⁶ With many consumers, but also many producers (not limited as, say, late twentieth-century French drama was limited by the number of Parisian theatres) and low unit price (compared with, say, paintings), and much profit and critical attention to distribute between works, the outcomes for any particular novel are volatile; identification with a particular audience has the power to move that work nearly to the poles of either axis (and hence to any corner of a legitimacy grid). Digital-era measures of esteem can make the relationship between wider audience and lower prestige even more visible, and to the general public as well as literary insiders: for example, Kovács and Sharkey’s analysis of Goodreads star ratings of novels before and after major awards found that winners tended to experience, in addition to the expected spike in sales, a drop in average star rating, while shortlisted books saw a more modest increase in sales and no obvious drop in star rating.⁷

Bourdieu presents this as an essentially irreducible problem: the novelist needs a mass readership if there is to be any possibility of making a living wage,⁸ but growth of an audience lacking in ‘competence’ leads to increase of discredit. Later theorists have noted how problematic a binary opposition between prestige and wide readership can be for interpreting contemporary literary fields, proposing a more nuanced approach that recognises the role of audience while respecting the significance of other factors. Squires notes that ‘the value-laden nature of this principle too quickly suggests a delineation of the field into markets for mass and elite audiences, as Q. R. Leavis’s does’, and goes on to demonstrate in Marketing Literature how factors including literary awards make it impossible to so directly couple status with audience size in twenty-first-century Britain.⁹ English performs similar work on the American literary field in The Economy of Prestige, emphasising the role of ‘journalistic capital’ as a third force interacting with economic and cultural capital and challenging the idea of a direct trade-off between the economic and cultural.¹⁰ But any increase in discredit due to changing readership depends on the visibility of the ‘competent’ portion of the audience in proportion to the ‘incompetent’ portion: if the incompetent, low-status readers were somehow concealed, their ‘loving a book in public’¹¹ made less public, the author could in theory accumulate economic profit without risking discredit. (Raising the possibility that authors such as Jonathan Franzen, eager for an Oprah’s Book Club sales boost but frightened that association with female readers and feminised reading institutions would drive away male readers,¹² can now enjoy income from female readers without being seen with those readers in public.)

This concealment of audience is in fact under way. The generic exterior of the e-book is not so much a veil of discretion as a blank canvas, a space onto which observers can project their ideas of what ‘that kind of person’¹³ would be reading. In the absence of data, stereotypes can rush in to any gap, and lower status readers contend with automatic assumptions that they are reading lower status books.

Enduring Stigmas: Women as ‘Incompetent’ Readers

The strong connection between e-reading and novel reading would by itself link e-books to women readers. The novel has been associated with women readers since its inception: not only as a genre shaped to accommodate the requirements (or what were assumed to be the requirements) of female customers but also one that developed in tandem with mass female readership and conceptions of female readership, and even tasked, to a greater degree than other literary forms, with defining what a modern woman could and should be.²⁴ ‘By the middle of the 19^th century…the novel was already known as a female form of writing’, and ‘throughout the [Victorian and Edwardian] period novels were at the centre of discussions concerning women and reading’.²⁵ But e-books, associated with lower status texts, are also associated with female readership because of the persistently lower status of women readers, ‘women’s genres’, and women’s reading practices.

Most readers are women, and women, on average, read more books than men,²⁶ but women do not enjoy equal status as readers or occupy most positions of power and influence in the literary world. The ‘woman reader’ is a figure identified as both different (an essential point in separating out women’s reading as both atypical and in need of anxious examination) and inferior for millennia.²⁷ ‘Men have historically been associated with elite culture, while women have been linked with more commercial forms’²⁸ and women’s mass participation, with reading and with the novel in particular, has led not to full participation in the elite but rather a sectioning-off of literary culture, where women (and the books they read, the books they write, the literary institutions they patronise, etc.) are corralled into lower status zones. Though the majority of publishing professionals are now women, the majority of senior positions are still held by men,²⁹ and the majority, sometimes the overwhelming majority, of both book reviewers and authors reviewed in elite literary magazines and journals are male.³⁰ In library and records management, the UK workforce is approximately gender-balanced (in contrast to the global workforce, where four out of five librarians are women), but men have higher average pay and are nearly twice as likely to hold senior management positions.³¹ At present, ‘the literary field that fosters modernist fiction gendered male has its related mother-field, the field of mass-market books, in which middlebrow women readers exert power’.³² Driscoll defines the literary middlebrow as ‘a broad phenomenon…allowing for different registers and formations’ that nonetheless can be tracked by a ‘family resemblance’ where all middlebrow institutions share most of a set of eight features: middle class, reverential, entrepreneurial, mediated, emotional, recreational, earnest, and, crucially for digital reading, feminised.³³ Humble explains that ‘texts move in and out of bounds [of the middlebrow] depending on who is perceived to be reading them’, and popular success demotes a book down the highbrow-middlebrow-lowbrow axis, the more dramatic the success and the more populist the venue, the more severe the damage; ‘selection as a “Book of the Month” by a newspaper would inevitably push a book into the middlebrow category, as, often, would “bestseller” status…indeed, there is much evidence to suggest that…a predominantly female readership very often automatically consigned a text to the category of middlebrow’.³⁴

E-books are also associated with women because of the prominence of women as creators in modern self-publishing. Though there are few reliable statistics for self-publishing, several studies indicate that the majority of self-published authors, both for Amazon’s KDP and similar models and for free sources such as Wattpad, are likely female.³⁵ Just as the texts they produce are held at arm’s length, only sporadically granted the designation of ‘book’, the writers are frequently fenced off from the designation of ‘author’.³⁶

‘Guilty Pleasures’

A major factor in perceptions of women’s digital reading as furtive consumption of ‘guilty pleasures’³⁷ is the status of romance fiction, particularly stereotypes of voracious and exclusive readers of popular fiction caricatured as ‘undiscriminating, without judgement, a passive consumer gulping down rubbish by the gallon’³⁸ while ignoring more nutritious fare.³⁹ Romance is a major category in both print and digital formats⁴⁰ and a genre with a unique publication history.⁴¹ Its complexities make it a zone of disagreement and debate among literary scholars,⁴² but three points of agreement are its importance to the publishing industry, its association with female readers, and its low status. While the idea that this one genre is somehow uniquely lacking in worth, inherently less valuable than any other form of popular fiction, is ludicrous, this is a charge levelled at romance and an image with which readers must contend. While it is reasonable to investigate whether privacy (rather than, say, lower price, speed of access, or availability of digital-original titles) is a primary reason for the genre’s success on screen, it is not reasonable to skip the investigation and assume that correlation is causation, leading to ‘train commuters reading spicy novels on iPhone but crime stories in paperback’.⁴³ This assumption was visible in focus groups. Privacy of this kind was rarely mentioned, but when it was the furtive reading was instantly associated with ‘women’s genres’ of erotica and romance. One participant, a student pursuing her master’s degree in publishing (who did not read romance herself or choose digital for reasons of privacy), knew about digital romance sales figures and leapt to the conclusion that the cause was romance readers’ desire for privacy.

Only one (female) individual in any focus group or interview described privacy of this kind as important to her personally; she was one of only two respondents who spoke about reading romance novels. She was teased by a (male) fellow participant.

• P1: ‘And then there are some books I might not necessarily want people to see that I’m reading. For example, some romance books. There’s an author I quite like called Shelley Lawrence; she writes kind of like the romance thing and the covers are always quite sort of, of, like, I don’t know…’

• P2: ‘[laughing] Do they have shirtless men?’

• P1: ‘[sounding nettled] No, not necessarily. [laughter from other participants] Well, it depends, because they have different versions, now, of [covers]. It’s just, you can more easily hide what you’re reading on a Kindle.’ (All FG 2)

Later, when the same respondent (P1) was discussing the experience of strangers striking up a conversation with her regarding the print copy of an Orwell classic she was reading in public, the other participant (P2) continued to tease her: ‘secretly, you had the romance tucked under it!’, making it clear that her earlier statement had been noted as a meaningful admission (or confession) and was neither forgotten nor forgiven.

This display of teasing (in this instance, it was between coursemates and appeared to be done, and accepted, in a generally good-natured spirit) also demonstrates the next step of the folk wisdom that women habitually conceal taboo reading: that whenever a woman’s reading can’t be seen or verified, it is assumed that the reading is taboo. This assumption is prominent in the discussion even in the face of immediate reminders (including, in this case, shortly beforehand in the same conversation, ‘I read a lot of classics on the Kindle, ’cause you can get them for free’ that female as well as male e-book readers frequently choose classics, in part because so many are available for ‘free of charge’ on Amazon and via Project Gutenberg).⁴⁴ There is explicit recognition that because anonymous e-book reading means sacrificing cultural capital attached to public reading of prestigious titles, readers are discouraged from accessing such titles on screen.

Romance was unique in these focus groups as the only genre singled out for ridicule and derision. The respondent teased earlier for her romance reading had elsewhere in the conversation noted that she reads (in addition to high-status classics and literary fiction) fan fiction, young adult (YA), science fiction, and fantasy. None of this reading attracted jeers. (In focus group 1, one reader, participant 4, was tentative and apologetic in discussing Harry Potter fan fiction that she had read, but no one in the group picked up on this as embarrassing or even noteworthy.)⁴⁵ In focus group 6, participant 4, the only other participant who openly discussed reading romance, did not wait for it to be criticised by the group but instead criticised it herself: ‘don’t [read romance, as she does]. You shouldn’t, it’s all garbage [General laughter]’.

Fifty Shades: The Only E-book Published in the Twenty-first Century

More than a decade after its release, Fifty Shades of Grey remains embedded at the centre of debates on digital reading privacy. In studying commentary on the topic, I have encountered virtually no journalism published since 2012 on the trope of Kindles used for furtive reading that did not mention this series: journalism on any aspect of digital reading is, in fact, highly likely to mention it. There are reasons for its prominence in these debates. It was unquestionably a publishing phenomenon: even the least prominent books in the series were bestsellers⁴⁶ and the series as a whole was a fixture (not to say fixation) of early twenty-first-century cultural conversation, invoked in discussions that range far beyond books and publishing. Its colourful origin story (e.g. a work of fan fiction that stunned industry insiders and made its author fabulously wealthy) is exciting and widely known, and easily invoked by commentators to support a wide variety of arguments, from women’s empowerment to women’s triviality to a new cultural frankness to imminent cultural collapse. And the theory that its success is bound up with secretive digital reading was raised early by a woman with an insider’s knowledge and perspective: James’s agent, Valerie Hoskins, told The New York Times in 2012 that ‘one of the things about this is that in the 21^st century, women have the ability to read this kind of material without anybody knowing what they’re reading, because they can read them on their iPads and Kindles’.⁴⁷ Nicolas Carr goes further, concluding that benevolent supervision had, pre-Kindle, protected the publishing industry and the culture from the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey: ‘We may even be a little embarrassed to be seen reading them, which makes anonymous digital versions all the more appealing. The “Fifty Shades of Grey” phenomenon probably wouldn’t have happened if e-books didn’t exist.’⁴⁸ His hypothesis curiously overlooks Fifty Shades’ parallel success in print; as Colbjørnsen observes,⁴⁹ the mega-selling paperbacks sold in a plethora of formats, sporting a wide array of cover designs, all of them visible to the naked eye. The series’ overwhelming presence dominates and skews discussion of digital reading, but most particularly women’s digital reading, and similarly skews perceptions of what is ‘typical’ screen reading and what the motivations of a typical e-novel reader (at least a female e-novel reader) might be.

Fifty Shades of Grey bears almost every possible stigma in terms of literary legitimacy. It is genre fiction, and a hybrid of two of the most derided forms, erotica and romance. It began as a piece of fan fiction. It was originally self-published, and in digital-original form. It was written by a woman for a female audience. It is not generally regarded as well-written.⁵⁰ (In its defence, Archer and Jockers marshal machine learning data to argue that while the line-by-line prose may be awkward, the first novel in the series is, in fact, expertly paced.)⁵¹ And, as noted earlier, it is a bestseller of historic proportions, which according to Bourdieu would by itself accrue historic levels of discredit.

No one in the interviews or the free-text boxes of the survey mentioned Fifty Shades of Grey, but it was mentioned (not raised by the facilitator, but by participants) in half of the focus groups. Focus group participants were aware of the Fifty Shades of Grey assumptions as something widely shared in the media, but notably did not express agreement: it was couched as something ‘they’ said and thought (a hallmark of reputation as meta-belief).⁵²

It is interesting that both participants quoted earlier (one male and one female) said ‘people’ rather than ‘women’, whereas James’s agent spoke specifically of women. While the success of the series is attributed to (and resulting damage to literature blamed on) women, it is acknowledged that men do sometimes read it; to avoid censure, they must ensure that their interest is perceived as critical or academic, not personal. (Charles McGrath, author, past New Yorker fiction editor and New York Times book review editor, and confirmed member of the literary establishment, laughed at himself for hiding his childhood copy of Little Women behind a homemade brown paper wrapper, but still takes pains to make clear that his and his friends’ Kindle reading of Fifty Shades of Grey was for professional reasons.)⁵³ If they are suspected of enjoying such books, sharing such tastes (feminine, juvenile, or both), mockery can be harsh and enduring, as with a participant deriding her father: ‘he’s got the taste of a teenage girl. He actually, like, legitimately likes Twilight, and I’m still judging him for it many years later’.⁵⁴

While journalism on ‘Kindle smut’ frequently features headlines about guilt and shame (e.g. ‘A cover-up! Guilty secret we hide in our Kindles’ or ‘Ebook readers’ guilty pleasures revealed’), interviewees the articles quote often tell more complex stories about public mockery and the variety of possible responses to it.⁵⁵ Sarah Wendell, author and co-creator of the romance website Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com) agrees that concealment is a major factor for digital sales of romance and erotica because ‘women get enough commentary when they check out at a bookstore with romance novels. The commentary when you go to buy an erotic novel is even worse, so if you have the safety of doing it anonymously online, you take it’, but she herself ‘no longer cares what people think of her reading habits’ and while fellow commuters still regularly bother her, they do so at their own risk.⁵⁶ An anonymous reader recounted a story of moving to digital reading after being teased on a plane: ‘but I was like, gosh, never again can I be out in public with these books with questionable titles and creepy people on the front all draped over each other’.⁵⁷ These are not stories of ‘guilty secrets’ or ‘guilty pleasures’ so much as stories of anticipation of and pragmatic response to pestering. In general, what readers are describing as their own experience of furtive reading is embarrassment, with shame reserved for much more specific book-related transgressions.

Embarrassment versus Shame

Any specific mention of shame by participants is noteworthy, all the more so as shame is a cultural preoccupation and recent fixture of the bestseller lists,⁵⁸ whether filed in the Self-Help section with John Bradshaw or Humour with Jon Ronson. While older participants in my study came of age in a time when, in the US and the UK, shame was discussed as a valuable means of managing behaviour,⁵⁹ current debates are shaped more by Gilligan’s hugely influential theories of shame as unproductive and profoundly damaging to the individual and society.⁶⁰ Philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians of emotion, and researchers and clinicians from other disciplines distinguish between embarrassment, guilt, and shame in different ways (some describe embarrassment as a lesser version of shame, some as a distinct but related emotion), but there are areas of intersection. One is that they are not equally painful: embarrassment is less intense, an emotion suited to a relatively minor transgression, or simply to being caught doing in public something normally done in private (it is not for nothing that the reader of popular fiction is ‘imagined as…virtually masturbatory’).⁶¹ Another is that they have different relationships to outside judgement: while shame may be either public or private, embarrassment typically requires an audience. Shame researcher Brené Brown (whose bestselling popular books and famous TED talk, at 61 million views one of the most-watched in the organisation’s history, have made her an extraordinarily prominent academic)⁶² has popularised a definition of shame as ‘an intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance or belonging’, quite distinct from guilt, ‘a feeling that results from behaving in a flawed or bad way rather than flawed or bad self’.⁶³

Participants in my study rarely use the words shame, guilt, or embarrassment. Quantifying the mentions reveals how infrequently they appear in these readers’ conversations about e-reading, in sharp contrast to the frequency with which they appear in journalists’ coverage of e-reading. The few instances where they use the word ‘shame’ suggest that they do, in fact, subscribe to the above-mentioned concepts of shame hierarchy (where shame is more serious than embarrassment) and the importance of observation. In this set of qualitative data, personal shame is mentioned only twice: one participant described ‘shamefully’ buying high-quality books but giving them as gifts instead of reading them herself, and another reported that she ‘dropped Salman Rushdie in the bath and I’ve never been so ashamed in my life’ (this experience of shame, interestingly, came from the same participant who described romance novels as merely ‘embarrassing’).⁶⁴ There were three mentions of guilt: avoiding it by buying books one wanted to annotate electronically, as one can mark up an e-book ‘without guilt’ (this relates, like one shame example, to remorse over mistreating a print book), proudly rejecting it for the non-crime of excessive book buying (‘I buy far more books than I read and I have no guilt’), and of other people’s lowbrow reading as ‘guilty pleasures’.⁶⁵ Embarrassment is mentioned twice: once, as mentioned earlier, in describing romance novels as embarrassing books, and second, in describing Amazon’s dynamic estimated reading time, where glancing away from the page means being branded a slow reader, an ‘embarrassing’ identity imposed (unfairly) by a ‘judgmental’ Amazon⁶⁶ (this instance of resented surveillance, and the problem of Amazon, is one I’ll discuss further in the context of intellectual privacy). These six are the only examples, but they do together suggest meaningful distinctions. Shame was experienced, and came from ruining a print book and from failing to read a book one has bought, but was not attributed to others. Guilt was experienced, from marking up a print book (or rather, avoided by not marking up a print book), and was attributed to others for ‘guilty pleasure’ reading. Embarrassment was experienced, from being labelled a slow reader by Amazon, and attributed to others for being seen to read a romance novel in public (not, notably, for reading romance, but for being seen with it; readers do not have to agree that their reading is shameful to know that they are likely to be attacked for it). Shame was reserved for damaging or neglecting books. Embarrassment was specific to being caught looking unbookish in public.

E-books and e-novels in this way function as parts of books: the text without publicly visible paratext. E-novels are in that sense precisely what the book-shamed reader quoted earlier wanted: the romance novels she liked to read without the lurid, ‘creepy’ covers she neither liked nor wanted to be seen with, and indeed the reading experience without the public shaming experience. This represents, in one sense, freedom: the ability to read in public without being harangued by strangers. In theory, this might also, should the reading be low-status, evade discredit. However, stereotypes and tropes of Kindle reading as a tool for furtive readers may invite observers to assume that all her anonymous reading is low-status: that she only reads digitally because her reading is ‘embarrassing’ (activating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas of private reading as dangerous, with female readers in particular restrained only by fear of censure, and reaching for the trash and smut the moment their benevolent supervisors’ backs are turned). If so, her choice of reading digitally does not evade discredit, it invites it; the price of digital reading is not only opportunity cost, cultural capital lost when her high-status reading (as with free classics) is concealed but also a default assumption that any e-book – if it is read by a woman – is Fifty Shades of Grey or something like it.

Choosing Sides

On many dimensions of reading we are prepared to disagree without rancour. On aspects such as genre choice, evaluation of specific titles (such as Becky Chambers’s A Long Way to a Small and Angry Planet,⁸⁸ which some members of one focus group loved and others despised), importance of ownership, or attitudes towards book piracy, it proved possible for focus groups to air conflicting opinions without heated debate. An exception was appreciation of the material qualities of a print book. Groups could comfortably accommodate observations that hardcover books were in some cases too expensive for purchase, too bulky for storage, or too heavy for comfortable reading, as in this exchange in focus group 6:

• P5: ‘Oh, I dislike hardbacks.’

• P1: ‘I never buy hardback.’

• P3: ‘I love them.’

• P5: ‘I actively dislike hardback. I wish things came out in paperback first, I would buy them.’

• P1: ‘Me too.’

• P3: ‘I like the hardbacks, for the good ones. You know they last longer.’

• P1: ‘They’re too big.’

• P5: ‘They’re unwieldy.’

• P3: ‘I’ve destroyed…’

• P1: ‘Big and heavy, compared to many paperbacks.’

• P5: ‘They’re like heavy and uncomfortable to hold.’

• P4: ‘It really depends.’

• P4: ‘That’s why I like my Kindle.’

This exchange is typical in the sense that reading is held up as the ultimate good, and materiality scepticism (and even expressing a liking for Kindles) is acceptable when avoidance of hardcovers is presented as a trade-off in pursuit of an even more important bookish goal. The hardcover enthusiasts may even come in for some gentle teasing over the lengths to which they will go to read heavy hardcover books in bed, propping themselves and their reading matter on carefully constructed edifices of pillows (FG 6 participant 5), or rolling over after each page to keep resting a book on its side (FG 6 participant 3).⁸⁹ Groups were less tolerant of any suggestion that hardcover books were not beautiful, or did not sit at a pinnacle of desirability such that any other choice of format must be guided by practical considerations. In this exchange from focus group 4, when one member of the group (participant 4) says that she dislikes hardcover books, she is challenged (her account of her experience dismissed as unreasonable) and corrected (told that if her personal reading habits make hardcover books inconvenient, that is her ‘own fault’).

• P4: ‘Also, I don’t buy hardbacks ever.’

• P2: ‘Really?’

• P3: ‘Really? …why?’

• P4: ‘I hate hardbacks! Because you drop them on your face and it hurts.’ (laughter)

• …

• P2: ‘No, I don’t.’

• P3: ‘ I have never done that.’

• P4: ‘I have dropped them on my face and that is painful.’

• P3: ‘Well, that’s your own fault more than the book’s.’

• …

• P2: ‘Then don’t read like that.’

• P4: ‘They are bulkier and they just don’t feel as nice to me.’

• P2: ‘They’re so pretty!’

• P4: ‘I hate dust covers. Dust covers are the worst thing.’

• P3: ‘I take the dust cover off…’

The recommended solution is to change how she reads, by holding books differently and removing dust covers rather than not buying books with dust covers in the first place. It is the very definition of the accommodating reader and the demanding book – along with a demanding, uncompromising bookish community.

Opinions about the smell of books were policed as fiercely. Extravagant declarations of love for book aromas, of the fresh-from-the-press (‘new book smell never gets old’) or years-on-the-shelf (‘the smell of old paper is magic’) variety, are a familiar means of expressing personal bookishness.⁹⁰ When, in focus group 1, one reader (participant 3) admitted to disliking the smell of new books (‘they keep talking about smelling books and things, and I have never done that in my life’), the group reacted with incredulous disbelief, shouting ‘what?!’ and ‘you haven’t done that?’ When the errant participant persisted, she was firmly corrected: told that her facts are wrong (that books do not have a ‘strong, unpleasant smell of glue’ as she believes) and commanded to educate herself: ‘you should go into a bookshop!’ This last is an extreme and telling rebuke, insisting that deviation from group norms can only be a sign of ignorance of, and inexperience with, books; in a stroke undercutting the dissenter’s bookish credentials and entire bookish identity. Later, a different participant is taken to task for not agreeing that old books smell nice and are pleasant to hold. When she explains that she doesn’t enjoy old books because ‘you have no idea whose germs are on it!’ she is laughed at, and instructed to stop being so silly.⁹¹

Again, the reader is instructed to adapt to accommodate the physical book: in this case not just to hold it differently, but to change her own habits, tastes, and beliefs. If a heavy hardcover is incompatible with reading in bed, she should stop reading in bed. If she dislikes an approved smell, she should train herself to love it instead. If she avoids ‘germs’ in every other instance, she should nonetheless make herself indifferent to germs when they appear on books. The rigidity on display here helps explain why for many readers time spent with an e-book that is expected to change itself to suit her, not vice versa, is so appealing (for more on enjoyment of the accommodating book, please see Chapter 4). When readers choose digital to escape such strictures – or judgement for non-compliance – they are treating e-books as part of books, specifically the parts of books that don’t come with responsibilities and burdens.

Elusive Display

As noted, reading on screen means sacrificing the cultural capital that comes from public display of high-status literature. If reading on a dedicated device like a Kindle means that observers are likely to make assumptions about what one is reading (including the common assumption that a woman with a Kindle must be reading erotica or romance), when reading on a non-dedicated device like a smartphone, the sacrifice is not only display of a given book but display of reading at all: ‘I’d have books on my phone and I’d read them while my wife was in the changing room at the mall or whatever. People think I’m texting but I’m just reading’.⁹²

One of the advantages conferred by personal print libraries, and not matched by digital personal libraries, is of course display of one’s collection. Reading is, to participants in my study and to the bookish circles they inhabit, both the foundation of and the window unto character: ‘hence the persistence of the old saw “show me your book case, and I will tell you who you are”’.⁹³ (Such quotes are, for people who linger in bookshops and book sites, beyond truisms and into the realm of furnishings, metaphorical and literal: Heidegger’s version, like Ruskin’s precursor and Mauriac’s development, adorns countless posters, wall stickers, screen backgrounds, mugs, scatter cushions, etc.) As US lawmakers put it in a Senate Report stressing the importance of reading and viewing privacy (a report inspired, pragmatically, by a burst of press interest in the video store rental records of politicians), ‘the selection of books that we choose to read’ is ‘at the core of any definition of personhood. They reveal our likes and dislikes, our interests and our whims. They say a great deal about our dreams and ambitions, our fears and our hopes. They reflect our individuality, and they describe us as people’.⁹⁴ But ‘reflect’ and ‘describe’ are some distance from ‘define’. That readers enjoy looking at each other’s bookshelves, and wish there were an equivalent activity for e-books, is almost as omnipresent as the observation that readers enjoy the smell of books. To readers in my study, display of books is taken for granted, simply part of life, but as a representation of one’s reading invariably suspect: when curated, too calculated to be truly revealing, when not curated too raw to judge.⁹⁵ Physical shelves can prompt ‘discussion’,⁹⁶ inspiring a social connection not about a single book, as in serendipitous public transport book conversations, but about one’s entire collection (and, potentially, one’s more rounded and complete book identity). As one put it, ‘you have people over and they like, look at your bookshelf and they ask you about stuff. Whereas…I guess unless they’re like looking at your Kindle or whatever that really can’t come out’.⁹⁷

The people I spoke to for this study overwhelmingly value books and reading, and display of books in any form tends to please them. As one put it, ‘I like books. I’m suspicious of places without books in them’.⁹⁸ But participants in this study actually spoke much more often of a personal than a public view: how bookshelves (physical or virtual) looked to themselves as the owners, rather than how they might impress visitors. Many descriptions of books that ‘look nice on the shelf’ and ‘make shelves look good’ don’t specify who is looking, the owner or a suitably impressed guest.⁹⁹

The physical bookshelf, with print books that are ‘easier to organise as you can put them on shelf and see very clearly’, was specifically noted as a better way to access one’s personal reading history, describing the visual review as effective in a way that a digital search was not. As one respondent put it, ‘books mark important moments in life’, and ‘just looking at the spines brings back memories’.¹⁰⁰

Digital displays were singled out by several as poorly designed and ineffective for finding the book one wanted, sometimes requiring shifts between different e-reading apps and devices.

Such displays can be equally inadequate for giving an overview of one’s full collection and/or recent reading. For some readers, digital ‘helps…keep track of what [they’ve] read/bought’:¹⁰¹ file lists aid in quantifying their reading. But others found that the screen display made it more difficult to recall what they had read recently. Despite options for sorting and searching e-book collections, what they ‘do find difficult sometimes is to keep track of what [they’ve] actually got’.¹⁰² Displays with excessively tiny cover images, or cover images detached from the e-book file, were a particular issue: ‘I think the cover thing with that as well, in that I recognise the visual, what a book looks like, because of its cover, and I don’t, I just have the title. It’s harder to browse’.¹⁰³ Books can be effectively lost because without the identifying covers they are neither findable nor memorable.

Functionally invisible books lead to what was recognised as a common and vexing e-book problem: repurchasing. Interfaces were seen as working so poorly for recollection and display that many respondents recalled buying, or having clicked through to a sale page to buy, an e-book they already had. Without reminders from Amazon about past purchases, readers don’t always realise they have it already: ‘I’ll sometimes be on Amazon looking at something that’ll be recommended and I’ll be like, “I think I’ve read that”’ or ‘I often get it when you get reviews, and say Amazon is giving this special offer and I’ll be, “Oh, that looks like an interesting book, but, oh, it says I purchased this six months ago”’.¹⁰⁴

The endurance of e-books, where purchased and even borrowed e-books leave lasting traces of an Amazon profile, makes the ubiquity of repurchasing all the more startling. For these readers, the e-books are there but not there, in theory constantly accessible but in practice inaccessible, because they have entered the file structure of a digital collection but not the mental map of a book collection.

But visual access to a personal reading history is not only a matter of organisational practicality. Digital shelves, while they have their uses, do not necessarily offer the same utility in terms of commemorating and celebrating one’s reading history and reading self. Several participants in my study noted physical shelves as important for the sense of achievement they enjoy in recalling their reading, citing experiences of ‘looking at the shelf and saying [ticks finger against imaginary bookshelf] ‘I’ve read that one, I’ve read that one…’ and ‘having it all on your shelf…and you can say, ‘I read that!’.¹⁰⁵

The personal digital shelf is not the only setting where display matters intensely even when the display is to oneself. Amazon recommendations are, to some, worse than a nuisance: disliked for their uselessness, but loathed for their inaccuracy, for the false image they project of one’s reading self. One participant found Amazon’s mistaken impression of him as a drug dealer amusing (he had purchased a highly sensitive digital scale to weigh small amounts of artificial sweetener for sugar-free baking, and then found that Amazon was recommending paraphernalia such as 100-packs of tiny resealable plastic bags). But others found unsuitable book recommendations insulting, or actively offensive. Some found Amazon’s ‘bombard[ment]’ an irritant: excessive and not always relevant, as in this exchange in focus group 5:

Some participants liked Amazon recommendations or avoided them because ‘they’re too tempting’, an indication that they are well-targeted at least some of the time.¹⁰⁶ For others, however, irrelevant recommendations provoked ‘hate’,¹⁰⁷ largely because they were seen as a symptom of a much larger problem: that Amazon thinks it knows its customers, but doesn’t. Amazon was seen as using ‘obvious’ and ‘corrupt[ed]’ metrics, such as recent browsing or the time one takes to turn a page, to make broad assumptions about its users: one’s taste, one’s reading speed, what ‘kind of person’ one is.¹⁰⁸ This offered constant reminders of how they were perceived by an unaccountable, uncorrectable corporation that observes a fraction of their book-buying and book-reading behaviour and draws the wrong conclusions from what it sees.

To be subjected to constant scrutiny and evaluated by such crude means could be ‘embarrassing’ (FG 5 participant 5) because ‘they’re judging you’ (FG 5 participant 1):¹⁰⁹

It is notable how often participants refer to the Amazon recommendation algorithm as if it were a person: a ‘they’ or ‘you’ that can judge or insult, and inflict pain as though it were another human dismissing or disrespecting them. The practical problems that stem from the existence, on some distant server, of false images of ourselves, false images that can be used against us (and not only in terms of reading recommendations), is a concern confronted in attitudes towards print reading privacy.

E-books as ‘Insides’ of Books

The signal quality of the ‘book-fool’, the book-fancier who loves books in the wrong way, has long been exemplified by someone who fixates on the ‘outsides of books’ when ‘due attention to the inside of books, and due contempt for the outside, is the proper relation between a man of sense and his books’.¹⁵⁸ The trope of a book lover as insensible when faced with a ravishing binding is not only a standing joke, a subject for ‘bantering’ and friendly teasing, but also a grave accusation of improper relations. The (lightly) fictionalised characters in Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s expanded 1811 version of Bibliomania are swift to defend themselves.

Price finds evidence of near-consensus in the Victorian era that ‘not content to ignore the outsides of books, a good reader actively scorns them’.¹⁶⁰ Ferris, however, qualifies that, noting the number of passionate readers who maintained that while the ‘inside’ was of course more important, only a philistine would deny the beauty of a good binding and the emotional connection of a reader to his personal, physical copy of a book that moved him: for ‘a real man of letters, the most fanciful bindings are often the emblems of his taste and feelings’ (though this was in the days of commissioned binding, when such ‘emblems’ were not just choices between different editions but often bespoke tailoring for one’s books.)¹⁶¹ Bibliophiles have always in a sense walked a tightrope, wanting to care for ‘outsides’, but not too much; to show oneself to be not only a ‘man of sense’ (and it is by default a man, as discussed later) but also of taste and of feeling. Digital reading offers an opportunity to align oneself with the ‘proper’ sort of book-love. If a reader chooses to think of an e-book as part of a book, specifically the all-important ‘inside’, reading even one makes a statement, as with ‘it’s the words, like the content, the information that’s in the book, rather than the book itself, I think’.¹⁶² Just as the presence of some (but not too many) lowbrow books alongside the highbrow in an eclectic book collection allows them to demonstrate that they are a cultural omnivore, not a snob,¹⁶³ enjoyment of some (but not too many) digital books allows them to prove that they have the knowledge and taste to appreciate a print book’s material qualities without being dependent on those qualities: they can appreciate the gem of a fine ‘inside’, whatever the setting.

A conception of the e-book as the inside of a book – and specifically an elevation of the inside of a book as the part that truly counts – is the single most prominent theme in responses on realness in my study. Of 197 free-text responses, over half (103) rooted realness (sometimes alongside other aspects, in the case of a longer response) in arguments such as ‘books aren’t defined by their physicality or lack thereof. To me, a book is the contents, not the cover/jacket/etc.’ – almost a quarter (45) did so using ‘content’ or ‘contents’ as nouns (and seven more use the verb ‘contain’). ‘Content’, however, is a fiendishly difficult word to define. It is inescapable in discussion of books, serving as a means of gathering under one umbrella the expanding range of textual and non-textual matter produced by publishers: as Bhaskar puts it, ‘content was once a grubby, near disrespectful word in the corridors of publishing. Not any more’.¹⁶⁴ But ‘surprisingly, for a buzzword, the concept of “content” remains relatively unexamined’, where publishers and readers use the term relentlessly but do not ‘state [any definition] explicitly, then it uses [a working definition] nonetheless’.¹⁶⁵ Eichhorn observes that ‘as the term grew more ubiquitous in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, critical dialogues about content – what it means in a digital era and its adoption and circulation across industries and disciplines – have remained surprisingly rare’.¹⁶⁶ Eichhorn’s study of the concept of content includes charting its shift from twentieth-century usage (when, as Tenen observes, the Open eBook Authoring Group could gather ‘to give content providers…minimal and common guidelines which ensure fidelity, accuracy, accessibility, and presentation of electronic content over various electronic book platforms’ with comparative confidence),¹⁶⁷ to complex and frequently contradictory usages following the web-based explosion of content. ‘Content’, Eichhorn explains, ‘isn’t necessarily data, even if the two terms are frequently used simultaneously’, but some older definitions corralling content as non-data because it is contextualised information, and/or conveys a message, break down when ‘some content – for example, the Instagram egg – seems to exist simply for the sake of circulation alone and not to convey a message’.¹⁶⁸ When ‘content’ can be stretched to include almost anything shared, even when not created by humans or requiring humans to receive it for its value or meaning, ‘content’ is a commonplace, mutually understandable, yet supremely fluid way of designating the inside of a book – one that leaves a reader with a great deal of room to manoeuvre.

The many variations on ‘same content’, ‘same number of words and content’, or ‘the content is what makes a book, regardless of how it’s consumed’ converge on an idea that ‘it’s the contents that matter’ – or more specifically, it’s the contents that matter most. Responses that echo the sentiment ‘the content is more important than the format/method of delivery’ recognise personal preference, noting that even if e-books are ‘just another format, that people may like or dislike’, ‘some people find them more convenient’ though they ‘might not suit everybody’.

‘Whatever you want to call it’, however, puts a spotlight on the importance of subtle differences for responses in this category. For one strand, in addition to ‘text’, ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ (all of which appear in multiple responses), the inside of a book is described as ‘words’ and ‘verbiage’ (or ‘the words and the pictures’ or ‘words and illustrations’). For another, as ‘writing’ or ‘intent of the author’ or ‘the work that someone has created’, foregrounding the role of the creator and recalling the ownership argument for realness (e.g. ‘the content that the writer came up with is still contained in the work’, and interestingly separating books as things that spring from authors, writers, or just someone), For a third, as ‘ideas’ and ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’ (and for one respondent, ‘structure’). In any of these strands, the book can be defined as that which can ‘convey’ or ‘impart’ or ‘deliver’ or ‘communicate’ or ‘port’ or ‘share’ that ‘whatever you want to call it’. But alternatively, and frequently, the book is said to simply ‘contain’ – leaving unstated who or what is the active agent.

Similarly, words used in relation to the ‘outside’ revealed varying conceptions of what the inside is, what can hold it, and where it ends. The frequently used ‘container’ (as with ‘narratives in containers, even if the container is my phone/ipad’) is highly generic, broadly defining the outside as the thing, any thing, that contains; as one puts it, ‘I don’t confuse container and content’. Some focus not only on the tangible aspects of a codex with ‘paper’ or ‘pages’ but also on the ‘cover’, ‘jacket’, or ‘ink’, in opposition to ‘bits’ and ‘bytes’. ‘A book is not a lump of paper and ink – a book is the written word’ is crushingly diminishing: the ‘lump’ not only recalling jibes about bits of tree covered in bits of squid but also firmly defining the book as not the material – the words being (as others put it) ‘independent’ of an outside that’s ‘almost irrelevant’ or ‘has no bearing’. But respondents also use ‘form’, ‘format’, and ‘edition’, as well as ‘medium’ and ‘media’ and ‘method of delivery’, concepts that are anything but interchangeable: as one puts it, ‘media, format and content are entirely separate things.’ A format that delivers information, for example, is hardly synonymous with a medium that ports knowledge, or an edition that shares the intent of the author. The number of ways one can splice conceptions of inside, outside, and means by which inside reaches the reader is vast.

But a minority of respondents argued exactly that. Free-text responses following ‘no’ answers included ‘for me the definition of a book is printed material with a cover. I’m happy with a separate definition of e-book for online material’, ‘a book is not just the contents, but also the physical object’, and ‘a book consists of the content but also the paper, weight, design etc.’ All rely for their power on with and also, accepting the logic of an inside and an outside, but maintaining that shorn of its outside, the inside no longer qualifies. ‘A book should have a cover and actual pages’ makes covers and pages, like ‘content’, necessary but not sufficient conditions for bookness. For these readers, e-books ‘are the content of story collections/novels/recipe books whatever, but not a book’. The earlier self-declared technophile/pedant dismisses these distinctions as ‘just semantics’, but those semantics, and their context, leave ample grey area.

Adopting a language of insides and outsides does not require accepting that the outside is irrelevant – or irrelevant all of the time.

Compatibility of Bibliophilia with E-reading

The usefulness of this conception of e-book as incomplete book – all inside, no outside – helps explain the compatibility of bibliophilia with e-reading. E-book readers are in fact fractionally more likely to identify with the term than print-only readers (34.9% vs 33.9%), though the gap is so tiny this amounts to a statistical tie. This is doubly striking as a number of bookish values, including enjoyment of the physical object and preference for print as better for keeping as part of a personal library, have strong positive correlations with print-only reading (please see Chapters 3 and 4 for more on these forms of ownership and enjoyment).

This raises the question of whether e-reading attracts those who already identify as bibliophiles, or whether e-reading may potentially amplify, or even activate, such identification. Evidence suggests that the answer is both. Digital readers are, above all else, readers: numerous surveys have confirmed that the great majority of e-book readers are also print readers, and those who read in both formats read more books overall.¹⁶⁹ Even if digital is not their preferred format, format flexibility can allow a keen reader to fit more books into their day, and ‘never have to stop reading’:¹⁷⁰ filling those last, frustratingly bookless minutes of a life with reading. However, as discussed previously, ‘death of the book’ debates have for generations framed digital reading as the enemy of print reading,¹⁷¹ and called for e-book readers to explain themselves and their supposed disloyalty towards print culture. Such calls may drive otherwise indifferent e-book readers towards a label that proclaims their loyalty to book culture. These findings demonstrate how unrepresentative opinions like those of the focus group participant who equated bibliophilia with being unable to bear e-books¹⁷² actually are and provides a sharp riposte to arguments that e-reading and bibliophilia are incompatible.

Identification as a bibliophile increased over the eight years of the survey, rising from 23.6% in 2014 to mid-30s in most years. The peak of 42.5% in 2020 suggests that the tremendous importance of reading for solace, comfort, connection, and well-being during the pandemic¹⁷³ had at least some – though perhaps temporary – effect on identification as a bibliophile (Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.2

Reasons for choosing print: ‘I would describe myself as a bibliophile’, by year.

Men were less likely to describe themselves as bibliophiles.¹⁷⁴ Gender differences on bibliophilic identity are highly intriguing. As Lisa Otty has explained, the positive and negative sides of bibliophilia have been presented, particularly in the early twentieth century, as gendered: ‘bibliomania’ as feminine or effeminate, and true connoisseurship as masculine.¹⁷⁵ This separation of the masculine ‘book-lover’ and the feminine ‘book-fool’ makes the under-representation of men amongst avowed bibliophiles all the more interesting. It could be a point of honour for some female respondents to reclaim the term. Alternatively, it could be that the word ‘bibliophile’, and all the risk it brings, has been less frightening for non-male readers in the early years of mass e-reading: as discussed earlier in this chapter, women are accustomed, and perhaps resigned, to ridicule, condescension, and scolding. But another possible reason for a gender-based gap in identification with the word ‘bibliophile’ is that its meaning in the digital reading era has been debated in highly gendered reading spaces, such as the book groups, online forums like Goodreads, and festival audiences that are typically dominated by women.¹⁷⁶

Identification as a bibliophile varied significantly by age, falling steadily for older respondents, a pattern that echoes those choosing print for ease of reading (Figure 5.3).

Figure 5.3

Reasons for choosing print: ‘I would describe myself as a bibliophile’, by age.

Identification as a bibliophile correlated positively with every source of print books in the survey, including gifts (underscoring the fact that bibliophilia is not just a matter of personal identity but also public identity: friends know, and buy accordingly). All connections are meaningful, but the weakest¹⁷⁷ was with libraries. While this is a slightly counterintuitive result, it could simply be the result of the higher level of book consumption from every other print source, including gifts. These avowed bibliophiles, who also highly value print for keeping as part of a personal library (see later), may be such active book collectors that book borrowing is less important, and even less feasible, if they commit so much time to their larger collections of owned books that they have little time left for borrowed ones. Even so, avowed bibliophiles’ levels of library use are average, not low (or only low compared to their heroic levels of bookshop, online bookshop, and gift use) (Figure 5.4).

Figure 5.4

Reasons for choosing print: ‘I would describe myself as a bibliophile’, by source of print books.

Avowed bibliophiles are generally ordinary in terms of their e-book use, with few significant relationships to sources or genres of e-books, or device usage. While they are also ordinary in most attitudes towards e-books, they stand out on a few key e-bookish values. E-book reading avowed bibliophiles were slightly less likely to choose digital because e-books are easier to read (14.8% vs 24.3% of others), or more enjoyable (5.4% vs 15.7%). They were slightly more likely, however, to choose digital for reasons of availability, or ‘the books I want aren’t always available in print’ (31.1% vs 20.6%); a hallmark of being driven to digital rather than drawn to digital.

In contrast, bibliophiles’ attitudes towards print books are anything but ordinary. Identifying as a bibliophile correlates positively with every other print value. It is the strength of the relationship that demonstrates what other values are the most bibliophilic. While links to choosing print because print books are more enjoyable to handle and use (87.8% vs 57.3%¹⁷⁸) and because print is better for keeping as part of a personal library (87.0% vs 52.3%¹⁷⁹) are notable, the most ‘bibliophilic’ value is choosing print to support traditional bookshops (68.8% vs 30.7%¹⁸⁰). ‘Love’ and ‘LIKE’ were words many participants used in conjunction with bookshops, and particularly for the ‘thrill of browsing in a second-hand bookshop’ (‘I love to browse!’, ‘I love to browse in bookshops’, ‘I love browsing bookstores’, etc.) alongside the satisfaction of supporting a traditional physical shop (‘I love to support independent booksellers where possible’, ‘I LIKE to support bookshops’, and grief for its reverse, ‘While I embrace e-books as convenient and an inevitable advance, I lament the demise of print books and of bookstores’).¹⁸¹ This form of love was only heightened during pandemic lockdowns, where mourning for access to beloved bookshops and libraries was a fixture of free-text responses.

Among avowed bibliophiles, e-book readers and print-only readers are not far apart in their views. E-book readers are, predictably, more likely to choose print because the books they want aren’t always available electronically. Print-only bibliophiles, however, exceed e-book reading bibliophiles in their enthusiasm for print being easier to read, the leading bookish value of print being better for keeping as part of a personal library, and the emerging bookish value of privacy – but not on print being more enjoyable or other signal bookish values such as wishing to support traditional bookshops.

The single focus group participant who defined bibliophilia in terms of antipathy for digital reading did not speak for the majority. The special relationship avowed bibliophiles have with print (they are more likely to obtain print books from every source, they have drastically amplified bookish values, etc.) is paired with a very unspecial relationship with digital: ordinary in their usage, mild in their opinions. Declaring love for print books, outsides and insides, is compatible with e-book reading. However, declaring love for the insides of books carries its own kind of risk, especially for female readers, given the negative image of affective reading.

Emotional Reading and ‘Untrained’ Readers

Novels that inspire empathy and emotional connection may, as there is evidence to suggest, enjoy greater commercial success,¹⁸² ‘have a unique role to play in promoting and nurturing pro-social abilities’,¹⁸³ and further the agendas of policy makers who hope that literary empathy will foster real-world altruism, yet ‘disdain for the preferences of feeling readers pervades literary criticism’.¹⁸⁴ As Murray has noted, a flight from affect is part of the history of the formation of English literature as an academic discipline.¹⁸⁵ Despite the work of generations of scholars of reading, including Radway’s analysis of romance readership, in questioning such a simple dichotomy, it remains easy to find examples where empathetic reading is casually set up as the antagonistic opposite of analytical reading, as in Jonathan Franzen’s account of rewriting The Corrections for the ‘open-minded but essentially untrained fiction reader’.¹⁸⁶ In the absence of a critical apparatus, and unable to cope with ‘difficulty’, Franzen’s untrained reader supposedly relies on lesser measures of a work’s quality, most especially emotional connection: feeling for the story and the story-world, and ‘empathy, sympathy, identification, and the reader’s “care” for fictional characters’.¹⁸⁷ This confidence that emotional response is a separate and distinctly lower form of response to literature, and that the unskilled reader does not without help ascend past this lower rung, is also gendered. As Studer and Takayoshi point out, the conflict between trained and untrained reading is dramatised in The Corrections in a showdown between a male literature professor, Chip Lambert, and a female student, Melissa; Franzen’s pivot to the mainstream was in essence a decision to ‘turn his back on readers like Chip Lambert and court readers like Melissa’.¹⁸⁸ Longstanding stereotypes of women as emotional, and by definition irrational, beings incapable of analysis (of literature or anything else) live on in feminised middlebrow literary culture where modes of ‘sentimentality, empathy and therapy’ characterise and stigmatise both emotional reading and the female readers associated with it.¹⁸⁹ Jonathan Franzen’s feud with Oprah’s Book Club is so often mentioned as an example of literary elitism, and sexism in the ‘high-art literary tradition’ Franzen defined as his natural home, that it is possible to overlook the role that book-love played in making the Oprah audience, out of all possible mainstream audiences, so threatening to him. It wasn’t just the gender of her studio audience, it was the genderedness of the studio discussion: its earnestness, its affect, its extension of the ‘sentimentality, empathy and therapy’ modes of daytime television to the discussion of books. The ‘readingophile’ who described her own bibliophilia in terms of ‘love of stories [even] more than the books themselves’ is using the language of affect to define her relationship to the inside of a book, and this makes it easier for a critic (at least one who accepts a binary division) to consign her to the lower rung of amateurish, non-analytical readers. For women readers, taking hold of the label of ‘bibliophile’ requires a measure of defiance in reclaiming it from its history of sexist use. It may also offer a counterweight: balancing the outside against the inside of a book, the caricature of the book-fool against the caricature of the ‘open-minded but essentially untrained reader’. These excessively, incorrectly emotional readers invite further ridicule when they broadcast unseemly feelings for a novel or novelist. Public dislike need not damage an author’s standing: as discussed earlier in this chapter, the right enemies can be as important as the right friends, and the disapprobation of outsiders with low levels of cultural capital can elevate a work’s prestige, underscoring how its virtues are beyond the capacities of the uninitiated. But public affection presents risk, and online reading forums, using the ‘affective language that is common online’¹⁹⁰ pose a threat.

Bibliophilia and Amazon

Feeling for a text in digital form is further complicated by feeling for the device on which it is displayed, which can be intense.¹⁹¹ This does not, however, map neatly to a strength of feeling based on device choice or, indeed, to device choice based on strength of feeling, or an easy equation by which novels on beloved iPhones are more treasured than novels on work laptops. This is in part because texts are not fixed to one device. As previously noted, most respondents in my survey used two or more reading devices in the past twelve months, and many regularly switch between devices (e.g. reading on a smartphone while standing for a train commute but switching to tablet or print on the sofa at home). But it is also due in part to the fact that some devices are linked to retailers, and these retailers may be distinctly unloved.

While, as discussed, a number of readers love their Kindles, not a single respondent described love, or even mild liking, for ‘the dreaded Amazon’.¹⁹² Rather, the reverse was true. While respondents use Amazon extensively and its lead over other sources of e-books remains overwhelming, their feelings about Amazon as a company range from indifference to mild distaste to active loathing. Some express reservations about its ‘business practices’ and effect on writers and the literary marketplace, even rooting for its demise (‘I hoped Amazon would lose money… I am a writer and if Amazon keeps growing I will not be able to make a living’).¹⁹³ A number actively despise both it (‘Hate Amazon and avoid them religiously for all book purchases, print and electronic’) and its founder (‘[during lockdown] I grew to hate Jeff Bezos so I started reading exclusively on my iphone’).¹⁹⁴ The depth of feeling only increased during the pandemic, where some respondents avoided Amazon for print book orders, not only because of their desire to support bricks and mortar bookshops but also from concern for Amazon warehouse workers and deliverypersons. The result is reluctant Amazon purchases (‘I might have to buy it from Amazon which I would not necessarily like to do’) or no Amazon purchases (‘I am now boycotting Amazon’, ‘I’m actively boycotting Amazon’, ‘I will not buy from Amazon’).¹⁹⁵ This stands in stark contrast to the love many respondents expressed for physical bookshops: while the occasional participant expressed dislike for aspects of traditional bookshops, such as ‘bookstore staff are useless’,¹⁹⁶ none hated bookshops as a category the way some hate Amazon as a company.

Even more striking is the way some express strongly negative feelings about themselves when they buy from Amazon. They describe themselves as ‘a sucker when Amazon recommends something’, or ‘Amazon’s dream customer because I read a review…on Amazon and, “okay, I’ll have that.”… So yes, [I’m] gullible, stupid…’, or explain that they ‘don’t like buying things from Amazon… But [they] just get suckered in anyway, because… “Oh, look, £0.99”.’¹⁹⁷ Among respondents who dislike and disapprove of Amazon, buying on its terms can leave them feeling like a ‘sucker’, a ‘gullible’ chump. Aversion to Amazon does not lead readers as a whole to avoid Amazon: it is too ubiquitous, typically the most convenient and often (especially in the case of digital-only books from KDP or an Amazon imprint) the only way of obtaining a given book. But respondents sometimes described themselves as something akin to accomplices in an assault on print culture: weak, unprincipled, cheaply bought. This intriguingly recalls accusations of disloyalty levelled at all e-book readers during the ‘e-book wars’: while no one in this study described their own e-book reading as contrary to the best interests of print or print culture, in this one specific way a few participants describe their own e-book purchasing as contrary to such interests.

Not only are Kindles linked to a widely disliked retailer, they also do not appear to qualify as ‘technology’, if technology is defined as something alluring to the group Duguid termed ‘triumphant technophiles’.¹⁹⁸

Patronage

But if e-book readers can own themselves closer, customise themselves closer, and write themselves closer to a given book, there is one way of deepening a relationship that can be quite different for a book on screen: spending oneself closer, but not in the manner of a typical product purchase. What readers receive in exchange for financial investment in book relationships is less of the privileges and satisfactions of a customer and more of the privileges and satisfactions of a patron.

Buying an e-book is not pleasant. It may be quick and easy, but it is unsatisfying.

Buying is often unnecessary, if one does not mind piracy. (And, as discussed in Chapter 3, many respondents in my study do not.) And buying is, in many ways, futile. Conditional use licenses do not confer either the same rights or the same feeling as print ownership (see Chapter 3). The feeling of being taken advantage of as a customer makes readers describe themselves as ‘sucker[s]’, ‘gullible’²¹⁴ and outsmarted – ‘book-fools’ of a very different kind.

Readers can instead reframe their e-book payments as effectively ‘donation’, and ‘patronage’, with reciprocal offerings for an artist’s gift, and the transaction as a gift exchange rather than a commercial arrangement.²¹⁵ Freely given support for art and for artists establishes a profound but very different relationship between creator and reader.²¹⁶ (Thinking of book transactions in this way brings to book buying some of the feeling of book giving, and the connection it forges between two readers; for more on this connection, please see Chapter 3.) This idea of spending one’s way closer to a text also helps explain digital audition: not so much buying twice as contributing twice.

Savvy authors and publishers are very explicitly tapping into this sentiment, and not just via non-book-specific creator sponsorship platforms such as Kickstarter (which allows members of the public to commit to prefunding individual projects such as games, music, or films, which are only made, and the patrons only charged, if a funding goal is met) or Patreon (which uses a similar online platform but takes pledges to an individual creator rather than a creative project).²¹⁷ Unbound’s business model allows reader/patrons to take part, via prepublication commitments of support, from the point of commissioning, and offers levels of involvement. Early commitment allows select patrons to literally write themselves into the book, listed in the first edition like eighteenth-century subscribers.²¹⁸ The range of pledge options typically includes print editions (as well as premium packages that bundle hardcover print copies with collectables and experiences such as signed bookplates, sets of bookmarks, enamel pins, or lunch with the author) but also e-books, with one’s name included in only the digital edition. Sellers like Humble Bundle (noted by several survey respondents as a source of their e-books), a company that began sharing indie games but expanded into e-books and digital comics, invite users to ‘pay what you want’, share the proceeds with charity, and post constantly updated leader boards of top contributors.²¹⁹ But other authors are finding ingenious ways to bend existing commercial frameworks to address readers as potential patrons rather than potential customers. Hugh Howey, a self-publishing breakout star whose Wool series went on to be adapted for television by Apple TV+, used the product description of a Kindle Singles e-book to directly address the reader/buyer and explain his creative aims, apologise for Amazon’s commercial ones, and to say ‘thank you’ (not readers, but you) ‘for all your support’.²²⁰ Despite its length, the passage is worth reproducing in full: what makes it notable is not just its content but also its context. The direct appeal is not before or after the product description, it is the product description, in its entirety: the connection between reader and author is what the supporter (not customer) gets for their money. Even within the ‘everything store’, authors and readers can choose to replace the language of commercial exchange with the language of gift exchange.

This form of direct bid for connection demonstrates not only how retail venues can be effectively hijacked by authors to further a patronage rather than a commercial relationship but also how such patronage does not require a physical print object to build a reader–author relationship of this type. Support for a self-published, digital-only work, and indeed for a self-published, digital-first author, can employ the same economic and emotive apparatus. When readers choose to become patrons of an e-story or any e-book on the same terms as they would a print book, to accept that they are getting their ‘money’s worth’ in terms of relationships and emotional reward, the e-book is functioning as real.