Abstract:Reading is a core concern of book historians, and never more so than now as the internet’s characteristic interactivity expands the reader’s role. This article takes the reader as its central focus to examine not just uses of the internet to comment upon reading after the fact, but also how online reading formations mediate the act of reading itself. The burgeoning phenomenon of online book communities puts readers into relationships in which categories of geographical location, age, appearance, and (to a large extent) socio-economic status are irrelevant, permitting a “purer” form of book talk than traditional embodied settings. Infinite Summer, a 2009 online book club in which members supported each other in reading David Foster Wallace’s (in)famously labyrinthine novel Infinite Jest (1996), documents reading as a formative process, in which readers are facilitated by networked technologies to intervene in the process of other readers’ meaning-making. Other online reading experiments work against the internet’s characteristic disembodiment of the literary text by fetishizing the auratic power of the individual book copy. Such online reading formations force book historians to reassess conceptions of reading as a private, solitary, and intellectually hermetic practice by foregrounding readers’ public, social, and dialogical interpretations. The internet provides a capacious archive of mass reading practices, precisely time- and date-stamped, to which readers previously excluded from valorised interpretative communities have far greater means of access. However, it is also true that many activities willingly engaged in by online readers are commercially valuable to the book industry, whether as market research, free publicity, or talent-spotting. This prompts reconsideration of some of the orthodoxies regarding the history of reading.

中文翻译：

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在线阅读：更新学科状态

摘要：阅读是图书史学家关注的核心问题，而且随着互联网特有的交互性扩展了读者的角色，这一点从未像现在这样。本文以读者为中心，不仅考察了互联网在事后评论阅读的用途，还考察了在线阅读形式如何调节阅读行为本身。在线图书社区的新兴现象将读者置于地理位置、年龄、外貌和（在很大程度上）社会经济地位类别无关的关系中，从而允许一种比传统的具身环境“更纯粹”的书谈形式。Infinite Summer，一个 2009 年的在线读书俱乐部，成员在阅读大卫福斯特华莱士（in）著名的迷宫小说 Infinite Jest（1996）时互相支持，文件阅读是一个形成过程，读者在网络技术的帮助下干预其他读者的意义建构过程。其他在线阅读实验通过迷恋单个书籍副本的光环力量来对抗互联网对文学文本的典型脱离。这种在线阅读形式迫使书籍历史学家通过将读者的公共、社会和对话解释置于前台来重新评估阅读作为一种私人的、孤独的和智力密封的实践的概念。互联网提供了大量大量阅读实践的档案，精确地带有时间和日期戳，以前被排除在有价值的解释性社区之外的读者有更多的访问方式。然而，诚然，在线读者自愿参与的许多活动对图书行业具有商业价值，无论是市场调查、免费宣传还是人才发掘。这促使人们重新考虑一些关于阅读历史的正统观念。