This lightly-edited, open access, creative-commons-licensed collection of essays is drawn from the Library Babel Fish blog at Inside Higher Ed with additional material exploring online reading communities, mostly published at my personal blog. I used Pressbooks to organize and export these files. The collection is available in the following formats:
HTML via Pressbooks.
PDF You won’t want to hit “print” – it’s 450 pages long.
ePub For Kobo, Nook and other readers.
Mobi For Kindle; I usually run my Paperwhite in airplane mode to keep my reading private. I’m not sure if that actually works.
Print on demand via Lulu. Even at cost, it’s around $15.00 with shipping. Lulu often has discounts – worth checking their main page for a discount code.
I am not using Google Analytics, so you won’t have to worry that I can see your IP address.
The timeline below, created using Knight Labs’ Timeline.js 3, puts the emergence of online reading communities into the context of the internet’s development. If you use Privacy Badger (and you should!), you will have to adjust the settings to see the timeline.
Barbara Fister, October 2015
Header photo by Alfred T. Palmer via the Library of Congress.