Timothy Aubry, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2011.

« At the very least, the Amazon reviews demonstrate that an awareness of the cultural and historical specificity embedded in a character’s experience can coexist rather comfortably with cross-cultural identification and feelings of shared humanity. Scholarly arguments frequently frame the two perspectives as mutually exclusive, at times endorsing a version of identity politics that scoffs at notions of universality, dismissing the ability of individuals within a privileged demographic category to understand the experience of those at the margins. And critics may be correct in asserting a contradiction or tension between the urge to identify with characters and the urge to acknowledge difference; but nonacademic readers are apparently able to manage this contradiction, negotiating effortlessly, if sometimes unthinkingly, between the two urges, each of which is necessary, I would argue, in different circumstances to manage the complicated social challenges that a multiethnic and globalized America produces. Perhaps responsible for readers’ untroubled capacity to perform this particular oscillation is the manifestly affective character of their interpretive experience – a state of responsiveness that can eschew the logical imperative to decide between two incongruous perspectives. »

Trevor Pinch, « Book Reviewing for Amazon.com. How Socio-technical Systems Struggle to Make Less from More », in Barbara Czarniawska and Orvar Löfgren, Managing Overflow in Affluent Societies, New York, Routledge, 2012, p. 79.

« Reader reviews also started to affect how publishers released books. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, before becoming the international bestsellers whose publication date was coordinated all over the world, were always published first in the UK. When the second book in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, came out in the UK months before it appeared in the US, more than eighty rave reviews appeared at the US Amazon site, including instructions on how to order the UK version with delivery in less than eight days. »

Lisa Nakamura, « “Words with Friends”: Socially Networked Reading on Goodreads », PMLA, 128.1, 2013, p. 241-242.

« 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. »