« Goodreads
turns the reader into a worker, a content producer,
and in this it extends the labor of reading and networking into the crowd. In
some of print’s earlier ages, books cost money, but talking about them with
friends was free. Today books are free through Google Books and Internet
Archive and, much to the consternation of publishers, through torrent sites
like Pirate Bay and Media Fire, but we pay to create readerly communities
on social networks like Goodreads. We pay with our attention and our
readerly capital, our LOLs, rankings, conversations, and insights into
narrative, character, and literary tradition.
[...] As the
cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling put it in a dark and gloomy keynote lecture at
the 2009 Reboot conference in Copenhagen, it is less the digital bookshelf,
library, book club, or virtual coffeehouse that social networks refer to than
the high-tech favela that is social networking. Built on “play labor” – the
recreational activity of sharing our labor as readers, writers, and lovers of
books and inviting our friends from the social graph to come, look, buy, and
share – Goodreads efficiently captures the value of our recommendations,
social ties, affective networks, and collections of friends and books. Goodreads
bookshelves are unlike real bookshelves not because the books are not real
but because they are not really ours. »
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