Promoting reading 1
Book circles and Reader Development Reader Develo
pment is a key concept in British discourse about reading groups (Lundin 2004). Reading promotion organisation and enterprise Opening the Book describes the basic principles of the concept on its website. Reader development aims to: • Increase people’s confidence in and enjoyment of reading • Open up reading choices • Offer opportunities for people to share their reading experiences • Raise the status of reading as a creative activity. Reader Development stresses the reader’s creative role. The book Reading and Reader Development: The Pleasure of Reading (Elkin et al. 2003) describes the concept as an extension of reader-oriented literature theory as it has been developed by Louise Rosenblatt, Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser. The Reader Development movement was founded by librarian Rachel van Riel at the beginning of the 1990s. Van Riel wanted to shift the focus from reading to the reader and began using the term Reader Development instead of Reading Development. While reading development is about acquiring reading skills, reader development is about the reading experience itself. Immi Lundin points out that the reading group has played an important role in this shift of perspective, which subsequently came to be well-established within reading promotion efforts in the UK. Reader Development has also advocated a shift of emphasis in reading promotion efforts from the quality of the book to the quality of the reading experience. Reader Development has apparently not had any great impact in Sweden as yet, but it has attracted the attention of Immi Lundin and Nina Frid, among others. The latter’s initiative Bokcirklar.se, for example, has taken inspiration from the Reader Development idea. More examples of practical reading promotion efforts based on the Reader Development idea can be found in the books The reader-friendly library service (Van Riel et al. 2008) and Reader development in practice: bringing literature to readers (Hornby et al. 2008). One Book, One Community: The OBOC programme Fuller and Sedo (2013) have studied social reading on a mass scale as part of TV and radio broadcast book clubs under the collective name of Mass Reading Events (MSE). The research has identified a breakthrough for this type of mass social reading in The Oprah Winfrey Book Club, which started being broadcast on TV in 1996. When the host of the programme drew attention to a certain book, it became almost immediately a bestseller – a phenomenon that has come to be known as “The Oprah Effect”. Another type of MSE is a reading promotion initiative that aims to bring together readers in a city, region or entire country around a book that all have read. The research uses the term OBOC for this type of MSE, an acronym for One Book One Community. As the name suggests, this type of MSE means that one – usually but not always fiction – book is selected to then be the basis of many activities that people in a given geographical area are invited to take part in. These activities include everything from book conversations to evenings with authors, to community events where people gather for creative fun, and canoeing excursions. The OBOC event usually includes showing of 75