The phrase “community of readers” likely brings to mind the
obvious—university literature classes, mother-daughter book clubs, perhaps a
circle of young people sitting under a tree in a shaded spot discussing their
latest philosophical read. These are the classical examples, and you certainly
don’t have to look too far to find them, but there is a new way for readers to
converge with one another that doesn’t involve a classroom, a living room, or a
grassy quad: online.
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| Image courtesy of esfquad.blogspot.com |
The online community of readers is a burgeoning one, and it
exists in a multimedia context. There are several websites devoted to anything
and everything reader-related, the most popular of which is Book Riot, which
includes daily columns by users and employees alike, and boasts not one but two
podcasts, “Dear Book Nerd” and “The Podcast.”
Outside of sites like Book Riot and the hundreds of similar
blogs that exist online, there are two distinct online reader communities of
note: “BookTube,” the aptly named community of YouTube book gurus, and “Good Reads,” the popular social networking site that allows users to create
bookshelves for books they’ve read, books they want to read, and just about any
category they can come up with in between.
Both BookTube and Good Reads have become so popular and so essential to the online reader community as a result of their stickiness and spreadability, to put it in Henry Jenkins' terms. The "stickiness" of these two regions of the web comes from the fact that they attract a devoted, niche audience whose engagement is held because they are passionate about reading, and passionate about talking about reading.
BookTubers like BooksAndQuills, PeruseProject and Bookables have created unique engaging channels where they frequently post book reviews, bookshelf tours, book "hauls" (videos showing a collection of newly-acquired books) and other book-related videos that keep their viewers coming back on a weekly basis, the same way they would watch a TV show every week. The producer/audience interplay makes it truly "sticky," especially because viewers can leave comments and have an active conversation with the booktubers and with one another.
Good Reads achieves its stickiness in the way that it keeps users coming back to add to their ever-growing online bookshelves--which reflect their real-life shelves as well. So much time can be put into the creation of one's own Good Reads page, and the ability to also post ratings, reviews, and comments back and forth with other readers through the Good Reads community makes it a truly "sticky" social networking site. The listmaking aspect of Good Reads fuels one's desire to return to the site as soon as you've started or finished a new book.
BookTube and Good Reads are inherently spreadable as well as sticky. Youtube videos are so easy to share on Facebook, Twitter, and by hyperlinks in a blog or email, so circulation is beyond simple. (Especially when certain videos are picked up by Book Riot or similar sites.) Embedding videos is a great way to achieve spreadability; BooksAndQuills' "April Book Haul" is embedded below:
Good Reads is also spreadable because it can be connected to Facebook; when your Good Reads activity shows up on Facebook, a wider audience can be reached and more people might be compelled to join that community and become active participants.
Memes are inherently sticky and spreadable. Once people latch onto them, they become immensely popular and they often enter into the cultural consciousness. One from a few years ago shows a pre-teen girl holding a handful of Goosebumps books and making a ridiculous face. The image saturated the Internet, with the infamous caption, "Ermahgerd, berks." (To translate: "Oh my god, books.") Below is the original meme and one I generated after watching a recent video from BooksAndQuills.
Yochai Benkler's discussion of changing network architecture is highly applicable to the online communities of BookTube and Good Reads because of the interactivity of the sites. User participation is encouraged in these communities. You would not have a lecture in a literature class with no student participation. You would not have a book club that had only one person leading and no one responding or communicating. In the same way, you would not have Book Tubers posting videos or Good Reads users posting their content with no participation from the people for whom this content is brought about. That would represent the hub and spoke model, which is irrelevant to these social media because it is simply impossible. These online reader communities form a web--there is a constant back-and-forth between creators and consumers, and these communities thrive on that interplay. The ability to voice one's own opinion about a book, an author, or any reading-related topic is essential here.
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| Instagram.com/emily_f_miller |
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| "Bookshelf tours" are incredibly popular videos for BookTubers to post. These are a selection from my own bookshelves, taken from my Instagram. |
Yochai Benkler's discussion of changing network architecture is highly applicable to the online communities of BookTube and Good Reads because of the interactivity of the sites. User participation is encouraged in these communities. You would not have a lecture in a literature class with no student participation. You would not have a book club that had only one person leading and no one responding or communicating. In the same way, you would not have Book Tubers posting videos or Good Reads users posting their content with no participation from the people for whom this content is brought about. That would represent the hub and spoke model, which is irrelevant to these social media because it is simply impossible. These online reader communities form a web--there is a constant back-and-forth between creators and consumers, and these communities thrive on that interplay. The ability to voice one's own opinion about a book, an author, or any reading-related topic is essential here.
In "Sociality Through Social Network Sites," (2013) by Nicole B. Ellison and Danah M. Boyd, social network sites are defined as "networked communication platform[s] in which participants have uniquely identifiable profiles that consist of user-supplied content...can publicly articulate connections...and can produce, consume, and/or interact with streams of user-generated content provided by their connections on the site." This is certainly true of booktubers' YouTube accounts and any person's Good Reads account. There is a serious interplay and conversation between the people who are updating these profiles with multimedia content and those who are consuming and responding to it, so these sites definitely fulfill Boyd and Ellison's definition. Their claim that social networking sites have become more media-centric and less profile-centric (although the profiles still exist and are important) is evident here--the success of this online community is due almost entirely to the content that is being created and spread.
To close, here are some fascinating statistics that show the user demographics for Good Reads!
