The ‘Digital’ (as a vast overgeneralisation) is changing the literary sphere at every level: publishing processes, notions of authorship and authority, books as consumer objects, marketing infrastructures mediating author–reader relations. Murray’s account of an expanded ecology of paratexts, that today we can further expand to Substack newsletters, BookTok, reading logging apps, presents literary valuation as produced in a liminal zone. Reading itself is altered both practically and culturally, from how we engage with texts to how we choose what to read from this “endless list”. Questions that these authors are considering 10 to 20 years ago, expand and persist. In 2026, I find there to be an increasing scepticism around social media, and so now we see an age in which reading seems to reaffirm itself as a status symbol – becoming almost a sign of a successful ‘escape’ from the digital. The image of the ‘performative male’ with a paperback in a trouser pocket comes to mind, which I think illustrates nicely how the physical book has gained a sort of aura. It can be a bit of a contentious archetype on many levels but relevant here for its irony as a trope intrinsically associated with the media yet it seeming to claim rejection of. It draws parallels with our discussion about design decisions and Daisy’s example of the Fitzcarralo editions that to me exude a similar aesthetic of intellectualism. I could yap on about the Fitzcarralo book covers and the significance of Yves Klein Blue, but for the purpose of this post, it’s a design strategy that seems to represent the publisher trying to articulate their role as merit evaluator. In the context of Murray’s observation that the digital literary sphere erodes the traditional gatekeeper role of the publisher, Fitzcarralo perhaps is using colour as a beacon to grasp at this authority of cultural arbiter, a role that is more diversified in the digital literary sphere.
Hayles’ analysis of reading practices in the digital age anticipates anxieties of attention fragmentation that have only intensified the following 15 years. I found her article initially unsettling precisely because it feels prescient, but ultimately Hayles seems to offer a way of thinking through this without nostalgia or technophobia. Insisting that close, hyper and machine reading function best in relation and conjunction with each other another reframes the ‘problem’ of reading as one of transfer rather than decline. The issue of cognitive overload should make us more conscious of mobilising different types of reading deliberately.
There seems a theme across Hayles, Murray, and Wright’s essays of how we assert our own agency as readers and scholars in this digital literary sphere. The optimistic takeaway from each is that we have the capacity to be more conscious in reading: both attending to the practice of how we read and how we choose what we read in a world where we will most certainly never be able to read everything. This autonomy is largely undermined though by the fallacy of consumer choice. Wright’s study of list culture describes how consumers are assigned the role of arbiter, but really this is heavily rhetorical, contextualised by the actual functioning of the bestseller-list’s own action in the book world as active marketer, not just consumer record – ‘the list’ in this way takes over this role of arbiter from readers without us even realising it. The reader might be able to gain this ‘meriting’ stance in other ways enabled by the digital sphere through virtual social engagement over texts.
Texts mentioned:
Hayles, N. Katherine. ‘How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine’. ADE Bulletin, vol. 150, 2010, pp. 62–79.
Murray, Simone. ‘Charting the Digital Literary Sphere’. Contemporary Literature, vol. 56, no. 2, 2015, pp. 311–339.
Wright, David. ‘Literary Taste and List-Culture in a Time of “Endless Choice”’. From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, edited by Anouk Lang, University of Massachusetts Press, 2012, pp. 108–23.
“The fallacy of consumer choice” indeed! I think you’ve captured what Wright’s article argues nicely here: it’s still a bit of a gut punch as people invested in English literature (to the tune of a good number of years of tertiary study on the subject) to be confronted with the ways in which what we might think of as our own impeccable tastes and independent book choices turn out to be shaped by larger commercial forces. Your post also made me think of the brilliant way that the show The White Lotus savages its morally questionable characters by satirising their performances of reading. Sydney Sweeney’s character reads Camille Paglia and Nietzsche; other wealthy characters sit by the pool with Aime Cesaire, Fanon, Judith Butler open performatively on their sun loungers … it’s hilarious. I like to think that whoever the screenwriters were who did those scenes, they’d read their Bourdieu. (Link to a random non-peer-reviewed blog post that explains this, for those who haven’t seen The White Lotus).