The Long Tail of Digital Shelves

Far from having been threatened, not to mention killed, by web culture and new media, literature has played an essential part in the development of groundbreaking commercial web based services such as Amazon, originally established in order to sell books online. Moreover, literature has found plenty of room in second generation web-based communities and hosted services such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies, which aim to facilitate interaction, creativity, sharing and collaboration. In some cases, literature even represents the main interest which very crowded web based communities share through social network services, such as aNobii, polarizing readers from the Far East and South-Western Europe, and LibraryThing, mostly attracting readers from America, Canada, the UK and India. Such systems make it possible for readers to upload on digital platforms catalogues of books they own and to interact with other readers according to their literary interests. New paths for literary investigation seems to be emerging, since private individual libraries keep surfacing through social network services. Namely, a comparative assessment of aNobii’s and LybraryThing’s statistics supports an appraisal of World Literature as an emerging system of long-tailed digital canons uploaded by people identifying themselves as enthusiastic readers.