If you’ve walked into your local Barnes & Noble bookstore recently, you likely encountered a table of BookTok books like the one pictured in Figure 1. Part book club, part…
Contemporaries Essays
Reading Like Rory: Post-Digital Reading on BookTok
Like many others, I downloaded TikTok during the pandemic. I’d seen the headlines touting its uncanny ability to personalize the content users see and was wary of getting sucked into…
SEO and the essay: what does it tell us about “AI”-generated text and literary culture?
Following the public launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022 (and then Google’s Bard and GPT4 in March 20223), many have speculated about how “AI” prompt-generated text is reconfiguring our…
Third Person Random
The US translation market is notoriously difficult to measure, but common publishing knowledge contends that only about 3% of books published in the US are translations. If you are interested…
Reading the Data Subject
“NOT AVAILABLE” was the phrase that appeared repeatedly in the data Amazon’s Kindle app had collected on me. It was my responsibility to turn the group’s .csv files into graphs,…
Young Adult Readers and the Genres of Online Book Reviewing
If you are a reader who uses any of the social media platforms where books are promoted, discussed, and displayed, you will have seen certain book cover images repeatedly, similar…
Reading through Wattpad’s Classification and Discoverability Algorithms
Classification systems are fundamental to how readers discover books and stories, both on and offline. Traditional knowledge organisation systems, such as the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system and Library of…
Introduction: Reading with Algorithms
On March 31, 2023, Twitter (now X) released its recommendation algorithm for public viewing and annotation. The unprecedented move towards transparency included . . . no surprises. Instead, it confirmed…
The Labor of Love
Midway through Colton Underwood’s season of The Bachelor, with just seven women left in the competition, the tenuous friendships forged between contestants have begun to fracture. On a picturesque group…