If literary studies want to understand the reading culture of the youngest generations in the 21st century, we need to consider the phenomenon of digital social reading. In short, there will soon be more books in computers and digital shelves than in our material literary collections. As a comparison, the US Library of Congress-one of the biggest libraries in the world-has around 39 million catalogued books and “nonclassified prints”, and more than 72 million manuscripts, collected over 200 years of activity.
This bibliographic treasure is a fast and steadily growing collection of short stories, novels, and poems published on the online platform Wattpad. There are at least 30 million books almost always ignored when talking about how and how much people read nowadays. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. GL received funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation. įunding: FP received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 792849, "Reading Literature in a Digital Culture".
#Wattpad stories read online code
The code (R markdown file) needed to reproduce the results is available as Supporting Information ( S1 File) and at the following link: A guide to access the data in the same way the authors did is available at the following link. In accordance to the European GDPR, data of the comments corpus cannot be shared publicly because this will expose underage users to possible identification. Data of the Teen Fiction corpus cannot be shared publicly because the copyright is held by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All legally sharable data files are available from the OSF database "Wattpad Titles Corpus" ( ).
Received: JAccepted: DecemPublished: January 15, 2020Ĭopyright: © 2020 Pianzola et al. PLoS ONE 15(1):Įditor: David Orrego-Carmona, Aston University School of Languages and Social Sciences, UNITED KINGDOM Quantitative and qualitative examples of the importance of digital social reading and readers’ comments in the margins. An educational outcome suggests that readers who engage in Teen Fiction learn to read Classics and to judge books not only in direct emotional response to character’s behaviour, but focusing more on contextualised interpretation of the text.Ĭitation: Pianzola F, Rebora S, Lauer G (2020) Wattpad as a resource for literary studies. When reading Teen Fiction social-bonding (affective interaction) is prevalent, when reading Classics social-cognitive interaction (collective intelligence) is prevalent. Our results point out the rise of a global reading culture in youth reading besides national preferences for certain topics and genres, patterns of reading engagement, aesthetic values and social interaction. By mixed quantitative and qualitative methods and scalable reading we scrutinise texts and comments on Wattpad, what themes are preferred in 13 languages, what role does genre play for readers behaviour, and what kind of emotional engagement is prevalent when young readers share stories.
We present several analyses of how fiction is transmitted through the social reading platform Wattpad, one of the largest platforms for user-generated stories, including novels, fanfiction, humour, classics, and poetry. In contrast to this, we show for the first time and in detail, how intensively young readers write and comment literary texts at an unprecedented scale. The end of deep reading is a commonplace in public debates, whenever societies talk about youth, books, and the digital age.
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