Investigating reading appeal in user generated online book reviews: reading as a meaning making process

This study will investigate the potential of user generated book reviews (UGBRs) to illustrate how readers’ opinions about a book’s appeal are contextualized within personal and social attitudes toward reading. It will employ an expanded concept of “appeal” from readers’ advisory literature that moves from a narrow focus on “book appeal” to a focus on “reading appeal,” or how a reader’s personal and social contexts affect their reading processes, motives, and justifications for reading. C.S. Peirce’s approach to semiotics is employed both as a means of illuminating the reading process and as an analytical framework. Preliminary results suggest that UGBRs might be useful to readers’ advisory services by both providing insight into the different sorts of appeal that reading holds to readers and by demonstrating how this reading appeal is constituted within different sub-groups