Goodreads, the Anglophone world’s dominant book-centric social networking platform, is a compelling example of algorithmic selection of cultural goods. By exploring in detail Goodreads’s corporate history, financing arrangements and commodification of user data, the article poses questions about the designed opacity of algorithmic selection processes, their self-perpetuating cultural effects, and potential privileging of the commercial interests of corporate owner Amazon. More broadly, the article ponders the optimal theoretical and methodological tools for examining the 21st-century book world. It ponders the shortcomings of standard book history approaches and canvasses what cultural and media studies frameworks may add. Given the increasing interpenetration of bookish dispositions and digital technologies, the article argues it is time for these disciplines themselves to merge.
FinkelsteinDMcCleeryA (eds) (2006) The Book History Reader (2nd edn). London: Routledge.
19.
FinkelsteinDMcCleeryA (2013) An Introduction to Book History (2nd edn). New York: Routledge.
20.
GallowayAR (2004) Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
21.
GallowayAR (2006) Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Electronic Mediations Series). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
22.
GillespieT (2014) The relevance of algorithms. In: GillespieToczkowskiPJFootKA (eds) Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp.167–194.
23.
GillespieT (2016) Algorithm. In: PetersB (ed.) Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp.18–30.
HallinanBStriphasT (2016) Recommended for you: The Netflix prize and the production of algorithmic culture. New Media and Society18(1): 117–137.
27.
HawkinsAR (ed.) (2006) Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism, and Book History. London: Pickering & Chatto.
28.
HenricksonL (2018) Tool vs. agent: Attributing agency to natural language generation systems. Digital Creativity29: 182–190.
29.
HowsamL (2006) Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture (Studies in Book and Print Culture). Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
LangA (ed.) (2012) From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
40.
LatourB (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
41.
LevyMMoleT (2017) The Broadview Introduction to Book History. Guelph, ON, Canada: Broadview Press.
42.
McGurlM (2016) Everything and less: Fiction in the age of Amazon. Modern Language Quarterly77(3): 447–471.
43.
MarcusJ (2004) Amazonia. New York: New Press.
44.
MarresN (2017) Digital Sociology: The Reinvention of Social Research. Cambridge: Polity.
45.
MatthewsJC (2016) Professionals and nonprofessionals on Goodreads: Behavior standards for authors, reviewers, and readers. New Media and Society18(10): 2305–2322.
46.
MorrisJW (2015) Curation by code: Infomediaries and the data mining of taste. European Journal of Cultural Studies18(4–5): 446–463.
47.
MurrayS (2018) The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
48.
NaikY (2012) Finding good reads on Goodreads: Readers take RA into their own hands. Reference and User Services Quarterly51(4): 319–323.
49.
NakamuraL (2013) ‘Words with Friends’: Socially networked reading on Goodreads. PMLA128(1): 238–243.
NeffGJordanTMcVeigh-SchultzJ, et al. (2012) Affordances, technical agency, and the politics of technologies of cultural production. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media56(2): 299–313.
52.
NunbergG (ed.) (1996) The Future of the Book. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
StriphasT (2015) Algorithmic culture. European Journal of Cultural Studies18(4–5): 395–412.
69.
TerranovaT (2000) Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy. Social Text18(2): 33–58.
70.
The Economist (2014) The future of the book: From papyrus to pixels. The Economist, 11October, 45–50.
71.
ThelwallMKoushaK (2017) Goodreads: A social network site for book readers. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology68(4): 972–983.
