Rereading Reconsidered: The digital and material afterlives of texts

Too many books, too little time… Due to the great variety of media at our disposal today, many forms of entertainment compete for our attention, sometimes even at the expense of the time consuming act of reading a book. But online platforms do not just distract from reading: they also propel an evolution in reading practices themselves. For instance, Amazon-owned book platform,
Goodreads, encourages readers to catalogue their reading with the aim of reading more books and rating/reviewing them on the platform. Goodreads operates under a logic of quantification that aligns with the attention economy in which attention itself is scarce and commodified. Despite this quantification and scarcity of time and attention, the data on Goodreads clearly show that adult
readers revisit books from their childhood. How can we understand this practice within the attention economy?
To answer this, Re-reading Reconsidered adopts a mixed-methods approach. Using data-mining techniques, I analyse a corpus of reviews from Goodreads to find recurrent themes and motivations for re-reading children’s books. Based on the findings, I design a large-scale online survey (collaboration with Stichting Lezen) which zooms in on specific practices and motivations associated
with re-reading. Lastly, I conduct semi-structured interviews for a deeper understanding of adults’ re-reading experiences with children’s books. This is the first systematic study of re-reading in relation to the attention economy. As such, it contributes to understanding contemporary reading practices not as antithetical to, but embedded in the larger media landscape, offering valuable
insights for reading promoters, publishers, librarians, and educators.

In this doctoral research supervised by prof. dr. Sander Bax, dr. Inge van de Ven and dr. Lois Burke, I examine the phenomenon of adults re-reading children's and YA books within the context of platformisation and the attention economy. How and why do adult's voluntarily re-read children's books when the workings of our media-saturated environment encourage quick and novel content? What does this say about reading practices and the role of children's and YA literature in said practices in our digital age?