The lockdown conditions enforced by Covid-19 in 2020 have affected the book trade as with all other sectors of cultural, social and economic life. This commentary addresses claims to bookshops being ‘essential’ (and hence should remain open alongside other essential retailers and services), and sets them alongside prior claims of books as ‘different’ to mass-produced consumer goods. The commentary sees this two claims as stemming from a narrative of book trade exceptionalism, which sit ill at ease with the urgencies of global pandemic, while also demonstrating some of the longer-term infrastructural challenges of the publishing industry, including the amount of economic and algorithmic power held by Amazon. The commentary calls for a reconsideration of how some of the values we might claim to have learned from books enable us to show solidarity to other sectors of cultural life, and society more generally.Acknowledgement: this article is based on a blog post that featured on the C21 Literature website in December 2020.

This article is built upon the unusual conceit of reading books, novellas and short stories with the same title: Highland Fling. Within the history of reading as well as studies of current readership, the cultural, sociological and economic practices of how readers discover, are recommended, and consume their next title have received much attention. This article records an autoethnographic adventure of choosing to repeatedly read books with the same title. It unfolds aspects of twenty-first century reading, publishing (including self-publishing) and bookselling practices, as well as addressing constructions of Scottishness within a series of texts and genres. Reading Highland Flings - a dance with recommendation culture - has been an exercise in both randomised and over-directed reading, a foray into Scottishness, genre and cliche, and an exploration of originality, authenticity, and stereotype. The article also proposes a conceptual approach to repeated reading of the same title (CAN CAN), and the (COVID-19 generated) method of the Ullapoolist research fling.

Abstract:What has the rise of Amazon meant for the novel? This essay argues that in shifting the scene of innovation from the novel’s form to the ways and means of its distribution, the company has redefined authorship as the entrepreneurial provision of good service to readers and reading itself as a repeatable experience of erotic self-care. Conceived in this way, all fiction is “genre fiction,” including so-called literary fiction, which for Amazon is simply one modality of the perverse pursuit of customer satisfaction among others. As an occasion for felicitous repetition, genre fiction takes the lead in defining the situation of the novel now, suggesting a new set of emphases in the critical analysis of the contemporary literary field.

This article establishes a quantitative and qualitative model of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) publisher ‘Tiers’, in order to enable researchers and cultural policy makers to have a more granular understanding of the impact of publisher size. Through an aggregated set of case studies deriving from the UK, the article also develops an understanding of how to build a cultural support model for publishing based on publisher size, sustainability and company life cycle. What the Tiers model underpins in terms of cultural policy funding for publishers is a rigorous and developmental sense of a publishing ecosystem, offering a framework which is attendant to industry and broader contexts, and enables cultural policy funding to take into account publisher development, challenge and growth.

While there are multiple approaches to researching cultural events, predominant academic frames tend to be either sociological or situated within a creative industries discourse. Neither of these approaches have supported sustained engagement with individual, interior experience at book festivals. Creative writers have imaginatively depicted these sites of author-reader interaction, and developing scholarship focuses on autoethnography and the phenomenological. In this article, we extend and materialise these approaches through a series of creative, arts-informed interventions: @AuthorsYurt, a personification on Twitter of the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s green room; Paper Dolls, a series of cut-out-and-dress dolls depicting audience members at a variety of book festivals across Europe, North America and Australia; and ClueButeDo, a satirical reworking of the audience feedback form at a small island crime festival in the UK. Each of the three experiments reveals aspects of personhood at book festivals, engaging with ideas of interiority, individuality, and experientiality, as well as of inclusion and exclusion. In pursuing this aim, we are guided by the autoethnographic slogan, “No Insight Without Inside, No Inside Without Outside” (Nunu Otot).

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the leading global industry venue for rights sales, facilitating business-to-buzzness deals and international networks. In this book, we pursue an Ullapoolist approach to excavate beneath the production of bestsellers at the Fair. Our investigation involved three consecutive years of fieldwork (2017-2019) including interviews and autoethnographic, arts-informed interventions. The book argues that buzz at the Fair exists in two states: as market-ready media reports and partial, lived experiences linked to mood. The physical structures and absences of the Fair enact its power relations and direct the flow of books and buzz. Further, the Fair is not only a site for commercial exchange but a carnival of sorts, marked by disruptive historical events and problematic socio-political dynamics. Key themes emerging from the book are the presence of excess, the pseudo(neo)liberal self-satisfaction of book culture, and the interplay of optimism and pessimism in contemporary publishing.

This chapter examines the gatekeeping orientation, evaluative processes, and decision-making role of the publisher’s commissioning editor through a conceptual framework of sensing the novel, seeing the book, and selling the goods. This framework incorporates the affective, and often bodily processes, of reading novels (‘sensing’), alongside the matching of taste to communicative processes and an envisioning of the material book-as-product (‘seeing’), culminating in the commercial impetus of books-as-goods (‘selling’). Through semi-structured interviews, the chapter examines the sensory and passional ways in editors recount their experiences of commissioning as a lived, felt experience but also as a professional discourse and an economic practice. As such, the chapter argues that sensing-seeing-selling is a networked praxis in which aesthetic objects, individual professionalized readers, emotional labor, publishing processes, company formations, material embodiments, and market environments come together.

he Frankfurt Book Fair, or in its native German, the Frankfurter Buchmesse, restarted in the aftermath of the Second World War as a symbol of post-war reconstruction, an engine of book industry capitalism, and a celebration of bookish cosmopolitanism. But by the late 1960s, it had become a contested site, encountering the revolutionary fervor of the period. In 1967, publishers had joined students in signing an anti-conglomerate declaration against the publisher Springer (which owned the tabloid newspaper Bild) on the grounds that too much power in one media group was dangerous. 1 In 1968, the organizers of the Buchmesse anticipated further trouble, particularly after the uprisings of the Prague Spring. "House rules" ("Hausordnung") were introduced, allowing the organizers to close the Fair to the public if the peace ("Messefrieden") was threatened, and requiring events (including receptions, press conferences, and musical performances) to have written approval. 2 Police were brought into the Fair and placed on standby with water cannons; the Fair was informally dubbed the "Polizeimesse" ("police Fair"). The route to an event celebrating the publication of a book by the German nance minister was blocked by protestors, with the latter making fun of the demand to let police through with the words "Macht aus Polizisten gute Sozialisten" ("turn policemen into good socialists"). 3 Some publishers reacted angrily to the Fair's authoritarianism, and threatened to stay away the following year if the "Herr im Haus" ("King of the Castle") approach from the Buchmesse continued. 4

This article proposes Ullapoolism, a post-data, activist, autoethnographic epistemology for contemporary book culture studies. It begins by addressing the challenges of contemporaneity and multidisciplinarity in researching the creation, circulation and use of books. We identify a rigidity that limits existing theoretical frameworks for the study of book cultures, and a paucity in existing research modes - including those from literary sociology, the digital humanities and cultural analytics - that collect, count and model book cultures. Our alternative epistemology, Ullapoolism, draws on two modes of action developed by the Situationist International -detournements, mischievous re-inscriptions of existing cultural artefacts; andderives, active drifts through space attuned to emotion - and addresses potential predicaments including recuperation and entanglement. The situated knowledge produced through this epistemology has practical applications. Fields are not neutral, and as mischief-making activists, we use creative critique and playful experimentalism to oppose structural inequity. Ullapoolism therefore offers a future programme for both cultural analysis and scholarly activism.

It is as easy to make sweeping statements about reading tastes as to indict a nation, and as pointless.' 1 This jocular remark by a librarian made in the Times in 1952 sums up the dangers and difficulties of writing the history of reading.As a field of study in the humanities it is still in its infancy and encompasses a range of different methodologies and theoretical approaches. 2 Historians of reading are not solely interested in what people read, but also turn their attention to the why, where and how of the reading experience.Reading can be solitary, silent, secret, surreptitious; it can be oral, educative, enforced, or assertive of a collective identity.For what purposes are individuals reading?How do they actually use books and other textual material?What are the physical environments and spaces of reading?What social, educational, technological, commercial, legal, or ideological contexts underpin reading practices?Finding answers to these questions is compounded by the difficulty of locating and interpreting evidence.As Mary Hammond points out, 'most reading acts in history remain unrecorded, unmarked or forgotten'. 3 Available sources are wide but inchoate: diaries, letters and autobiographies; personal and oral testimonies; marginalia; and records of societies and reading groups all lend themselves more to the case-study approach than the historical survey.Statistics offer analysable data but have the effect of producing identikits rather than actual human beings.The twenty-first century affords further possibilities, and challenges, with its traces of digital reader activity, but the map is ever-changing.Book historians of this period are confronted by a further problem.More so than other chapters in this volumeand more so than in in equivalent chapters in previous volumes in the seriesthere is a paucity of extant research for the topic of reading and ownership.In particular, assembling and interpreting evidence about the habits and experiences of actual readers -what Jonathan Rose has called 'the history of audiences'has only just started. 4 While research projects like the Reading Experience Database (which ends at 1945) and the Reading Sheffield project have begun to organise and preserve source material, a large part of 14 Ibid., p. 264.

From 1970 onward, then, via mergers and acquisitions, the ownership of publishing companies became increasingly globalized. This chapter addresses evidence for the plurality of output in a globalized marketplace, the impact of this for the consumer, and the growing opportunities seemingly afforded by fan fiction and self-publishing platforms. Consumption has become much easier to quantify in the post-1970 period in some countries with the introduction of electronic point of sale systems. General book consumer surveys exist in various publishing markets, but their coverage is patchy, and they often use non-comparable statistical bases. The variable levels of data provided via the International Publishers Association website clearly demonstrate this knowledge gap and confirm Robert Darnton's statement about the difficulties inherent in the study of reading. Moreover, given the variable ways in which readers acquire books, patterns of consumption do not strictly mirror patterns of reading.

Book awards are a pervasive aspect of contemporary book culture, attracting both substantial media and scholarly attention. They confer prestige, create marketing opportunities, push sales, and contribute to the early stages of canon formation. Yet, beyond occasional media splashes when judges break ranks and disagree, there is little insight into the administrative and decision-making processes inside book awards. This article draws on the autoethnographic experiences of two academic researchers, who were simultaneously participants (as administrator and judge) for the Saltire Society Literary Awards. In so doing, the article gives insight into particular moments within the administration and judging of the awards, such as changes instigated by research findings and debates surrounding gender imbalance in Scottish literary award culture. It also examines some of the challenges of operating as embedded researchers. The article analyses what autoethnographic methods can bring to an understanding of the Saltire Society’s Literary Awards and other cultural awards, and the implications of embedded research and collaborative autoethnography for 21st century book culture scholarship more widely. It reflects upon modes of embedded research by making evident the challenges and dilemmas of researching from the ‘inside’. The ethical framework for such research is far from simple, but in exploring particular moments with perspectives from both inside and outside the judging processes, and in interrogating the practices of literary consecration, the article casts light upon this particular ‘judging club’ and its practices, and illuminates ways in which researchers might consider, orientate, and carry out further research into processes of cultural consecration.